1. Many years ago, during a jog, a buddy and I were discussing the importance of coaching for running form. We’d experienced our share of common running ailments — IT band syndrome, sore achilles, patellar tendonitis — that we were considering hiring a running coach to help our form. Coaches were expensive and inconvenient, though, and many of the best coaches were located in running meccas — inaccessible to many runners. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could just record our running form and have a coach virtually analyze it?” we mused.

2. Some time after, that buddy, Dave, started a company, Sibme, that aimed to apply that concept to instructional coaching. He’s been incredibly successful at providing a platform that allows teachers to record themselves and instructional coaches to provide timestamped feedback that teachers can see as they watch themselves teach.

3. Now, though, he and Sibme are taking instructional coaching to an even new level with Artificial Intelligence (AI). To be clear, I have no stake in Dave’s company, and even though we’ve been friends since we started teaching together in Houston in 2004, he did not ask me to write this post as free marketing, nor have I run a draft by him for vetting. If anything, Dave still owes me for stealing a box of Kashi cereal in 2007 when we cohabitated as underpaid teachers.

4. Dave recently demo’d Sibme’s AI tool, powered by ChatGPT, for me using that lesson that I taught many years ago, and I was blown away at what it can do.

5. First, it can transcribe everything that’s said in the video. Much of that depends on audio quality, but even for this video, which was recorded in 2014 with an older generation iPhone, its transcription was remarkably accurate. Transcribing audio itself is fairly unremarkable, but the transcription enables it to immediately generate data and insights that are quite remarkable, like:

6. A lesson summary. Aside from getting my name wrong (admittedly, B and V sound alike), this is pretty accurate. A short summary like this could be valuable in helping an instructional coach understand the “gist” of the lesson, freeing them up to provide more targeted feedback for the teacher.

   

7. Teacher-student talk time. Coaches uses this data point almost like a “temperature check” for a teacher’s instruction. If it’s abnormally high or low, it can indicate an underlying issue for the coach and teacher to address. Even the sharpest coach would need to take such careful notes to be able to accurately determine that ratio. Previously, a guess would suffice: the teacher did most of the talking, not the students. The AI bot does it in seconds.

   

8. Question analysis. The AI bot can immediately analyze the questions asked and determine if they’re open-ended or closed. Coaches use this metric to gauge the level of rigor in a classroom, but even experienced coaches can struggle to transcribe every question during an observation.

9. Alignment to lesson plan. The coach or teacher can upload a lesson plan template and ChatGPT can analyze how well the teacher executed the written lesson. My lesson didn’t have a formal lesson plan (this was me as a teacher in a nutshell), but Dave demo’d this for me with another lesson, and I was shocked at thoroughness and accuracy of the AI bot’s analysis.

10. Scoring the teacher’s lesson. I buried the lede. Most incredibly (and absolutely most controversially), the AI bot can rate the lesson when provided an instructional evaluation framework, like the Danielson Rubric. Not only can the AI bot score various subdomains on the rubric, it can add descriptive evidence for each portion of the rubric. To be clear, no districts are currently using AI to evaluate teachers, and I imagine this will be a thorny issue for policymakers, education leaders, and teacher unions if it does get piloted.

11. Will AI instructional coaches replace human coaches? Dave was skeptical about this, believing this will be more of a tool to enhance human coaches’ ability. This might be akin to NFL (see the NFL’s strict rules on tablets) or MLB coaches or players grabbing the tablet to review video of their last play or at-bat alongside immediate analysis of that play.

12. I’m less skeptical. As I’ve written before, coaching is an incredibly expensive (and as a result often inefficient) way to train and develop teachers en masse. The metrics it currently provides lend themselves to moving teachers from novice to proficient. I could see a world in which novice teachers record lessons early and often and get immediate feedback on their teaching from the AI bot, especially if it’s a fraction of the price of a human coach. Teachers would avoid the shame of having to share their imperfections with colleagues and potentially get more frequent feedback — as much as they can upload, in a way (at most coaches commonly work with teachers once a week). More advanced teachers would still benefit from the expertise of a human coach, who might be able to notice more complex elements in a teacher’s approach, like their explanation of a concept or their feedback to students.

13. At some point, though, as these AI models get more and more data on teaching and learning, it’s not unfathomable to think they could do what even the most expert coaches currently do. And if they can replace the coaches, at what point could AI replace the players?

Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend!

1. When I was a principal, I had an attendance coach. The coach would show up at my school unannounced, request a meeting with me, and I’d begrudgingly agree (I dislike unplanned meetings…and meetings in general?). The coach would ask how attendance was going, I’d say, “Not good enough,” they’d say, “Ok, so how are you going to make it better?” I’d reply, “I don’t know, isn’t your role as coach to help me with ideas?” and they’d say, “How about a pizza party incentive?”

2. In the history of US K-12 public education, an untold number of pizzas have been baked and served in the name of improving student attendance. And yet, as The New York Times reported last week (and again on their podcast yesterday), chronic absenteeism has reached an unacceptable peak (Maybe Taki’s would be a better incentive?) I’m grateful for The Times bringing this to the public’s attention. Even so, I have some thoughts about the article.

3. The trends suggest that something fundamental has shifted in American childhood and the culture of school, in ways that may be long lasting.

   1. Something fundamental has shifted in society more broadly. Schools reflect a society and its values. In the US, fewer workers go into the office. We order more takeout, go to the movies less often, and abuse drugs more frequently.

4. The habit of daily attendance — and many families’ trust — was severed when schools shuttered in spring 2020.

   1. This is a bit of editorializing. We can’t say from this data that families no longer trust schools as a result of the pandemic. There is data from Pew Research that suggests the US citizenry has less faith in the institution of education, but it doesn’t point to causality. It could be COVID or it could be the social media algorithms that feed a distorted view of education or the politicians who’ve been stoking the flames of culture wars via book bans and anti-CRT laws.

5. MOST IMPORTANTLY: Students can’t learn if they aren’t in school.

   1. This just isn’t true. It assumes a lot, including that “learning” can only be demonstrated on standardized tests, which are used to measure learning loss and learning recovery.

6. In a chapter called “The Future of Learning is Not the Future of Schooling,” from the book Redefining Education, Professors Liz City, Richard Elmore, and Doug Lynch write about schools as “portals to learning.” “One way to view school,” they write, “is as a portal through which some combination of information, knowledge, and learning flows.” As the amount of information to be learned grows, they argue, schools look proportionally small and inefficient in allowing that information to “pass through” the portal to students. Hence their conclusion that “the future of learning is not the future of schooling.”

7. It made me think about AOL. Back in the early 2000s, American Online was the de facto portal to the internet. You got your CD-ROM with 500 free hours in the mail, listened to the annoying beeps and scratches of the dial-up modem, and were inevitably greeted with the iconic “You’ve got mail!” alert. But as the internet grew and expanded, that portal was far too small and inefficient in allowing the public to access the internet. Maybe school as we know it is becoming AOL.

8. It’s absolutely true that students can learn when they’re not at school. I didn’t have any grad school classes last Friday and I still learned a lot. I taught my 4yo to ride his bike and he spends 30 minutes or so each week, at home, learning how to read (this is the book to use if you have a 3-5yo and want to teach them how to read). Plenty of students learn from TV, social media, their families, and their friends.

9. Beyond that, there’s plenty of evidence from around the world that even when we get students physically into school, they’re not learning as much as we’d like. The Rebirth of Education highlights this tension between “schooling” and “learning” by sharing data from developing countries, where just getting students into school had long been the aim since the United Nations declared universal elementary education a goal for all nations. The world expanded access to schooling at a dramatic rate — but learning, at least as measured by tests, didn’t expand at the same rate.

10. Of course I still want students in school. Schools are important for building community and socializing. As a society, we have fewer and fewer reasons to gather in community: we increasingly watch movies at home, exercise at home, shop online and work from home. Schools are one of the last bastions of gathering together in diverse spaces. A better way to phrase what the NYT was trying to say might be, “Students learn differently (and maybe more) when they are in school.”

11. But hybrid culture is here to stay. The Times piece rightly connects the rise of hybrid work to the increase of absenteeism — if workers want the opportunity to stay home a few days, it makes sense that students would as well. Many students probably see their parents doing work and college from home and think, “Why can’t I do that?!” As the article also says, hybrid workers can also take more vacations, which means pulling their kids from school.

12. Districts alone cannot solve this problem — they’re already dealing with mental health issues, a rise in disciplinary issues, and trying to figure out AI’s role in education. But they can start by beefing up their online learning management systems (LMSs). Even in grad school, where all my classes use Canvas, the use varies from class to class. At best, some instructors embed all the instructional content, including quizzes, exams, and assignments, right on Canvas. At worst, some instructors just post their syllabus. In an ideal world, teachers would recreate their entire courses on an LMS so students could complete the learning remotely.

13. I’m skeptical of the idea, mentioned in the article, that more engaging lessons will miraculously entice students back to school. A similar strategy hasn’t encouraged workers to voluntarily return to the office — only mandates have been effective. That’s not to say we shouldn’t have good lessons and incentives, and this issue is more complex than just straightforward solutions suggest. Perhaps if schools were serving DeLorenzo’s pies (the best and don’t bark at me about this), food incentives alone could be the antidote to chronic absenteeism. My hunch, though, is that there’s no amount of lackluster pizza (the standard, overly-cheesed and under-sauced slab that most strip mall shops in the country serves) that can bring students back to school en masse.

Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend!

1. Earlier this week, four Brockton, MA school committee members asked the city’s mayor to help deploy the National Guard to help curb issues of “violence, security concerns, and substance abuse.” The mayor and other local leaders have subsequently rejected that idea — thank goodness — and it’s still worthwhile to dissect this very strange/awful request. There’s a lot to unpack here, so please use the comments to fill in the gaps.

2. A history lesson. In 1957, the National Guard was called by Orval Faubus to “preserve the peace” as nine Black students attempted to enter Little Rock Central High School. Publicly he said the troops were there to prevent integration so as to protect the Black students from the angry white mobs opposed to integration. In truth, “preserve the peace” was code for “keep the Black students out,” as Faubus himself publicly opposed integration. Days later, President Eisenhower intervened, federalized the Arkansas National Guard, and used domestic military intervention to ensure Black students could attend the same school as white students.

3. We don’t need the military to protect Black students or keep teachers safe from them. The majority of students at Brockton are Black. Shame on the school committee members for fanning the flames of the racist thinking that only brute force can save students of color and those who work with them.

4. Students and staff deserve safe schools. There are plenty of studies (here’s an old one) that show that students learn less in schools with lots of discipline issues. Years ago I observed a math teacher who was writing equations on the board as students, like a scene from a Hollywood movie, pelted each other with paper balls behind him. I can assure you very little learning happened in that classroom.

5. We had been trending away from harsh, punitive measure of discipline. A few years ago, after the murder of George Floyd, many districts began scaling back the deployment of police officers and school resource officers. Just this week Chicago voted to remove officers from schools.

6. Have we gone “soft” on school discipline? Critics have argued this trend toward more “restorative justice” has been detrimental. Here’s one example of a commentary about how “lax school discipline” hurts teachers and students. Here’s another. Fordham loves harping on how discipline has gone awry.

7. I disagree with the above takes. While I’m not wholly opposed to having officers in schools, it’s a mistake to believe we need law enforcement in buildings to keep students and staff safe. Healthy school climates start with good classroom management techniques, something that’s woefully under-taught to teachers and under-prioritized in many districts. Those healthy classroom environments get supported by school-wide systems that encourage a positive overall climate — while still holding students accountable for poor choices. Accountability doesn’t need to be harsh and punitive, it just needs to be consistent. The climate gets reinforced with really great teaching, and all of this is undergirded by healthy adult cultures in schools.

8. How did Brockton High School get to this point? I could write extensively about creating a positive school climate, but I’m more concerned with how things got so bad there that military intervention is the best solution the school committee can come up with.

9. Bad climate data. One issue, that’s related to my previous posts on education data, is that we simply don’t collect good data on school discipline or climate. Districts and other agencies that collect data heavily rely on attendance and suspensions. But those aren’t always the clearest indicators.

10. Suspension data is easily manipulated. When I was a principal, it was common practice for school leaders to unofficially send students home to “cool off.” Some principals gently encouraged parents to keep their student home for a few days. Why? Because suspending students makes your school seem like a dangerous place. And because it negatively impacts school report cards. Beyond that, suspensions only highlight the really “big” incidents — they fail to capture the small instances of defiance or disorderly classrooms. Attendance is also not an ideal indicator of school climate. Sure, high absence rates tell you something about a school, but kids are absent for a lot of reasons beyond the control of the school.

11. Bullet-to-skin contact? Natalie Hipple is a Professor of Criminal Justice at Indiana University, and an expert on nonfatal shootings. I first heard her in this episode of Revisionist History, where she talks about bullet-to-skin contact as being a better measure of gun violence. Because not everyone who gets shot gets killed, just like not every student who engages in bad behavior gets suspended. (Forgive the macabre connection here — I hope you understand the larger point) And gun violence typically begets more gun violence, and eventually that violence becomes fatal. Here’s a commentary piece she wrote in the Washington Post making the case that the US pay more attention to nonfatal shootings because “they should be treated as the true indicator of a city’s violence problem.”

12. Focus on classroom-level discipline data. In my second year as principal, my staff held an emergency meeting about how our school climate was awful. Despite using a lot of punitive measures in my first year, I hadn’t created that school-wide system to encourage a positive climate. I had a great team that helped turn around our school’s climate (shout-out if y’all are reading!), and one of the best decisions we made was to regularly publish our classroom-level behavior data. Any teacher could fill out a Google Form to document a behavioral incident that required a consequence. That meant we got an accurate view of our climate from the classroom level. The transparency and immediacy of the data forced us to do the work to improve the school climate.

13. I feel awful for the students, staff, and families in Brockton. They deserve a safe and positive school climate. I hope they get the help they need to create such a climate. I just pray it’s not in the form of armed forces.

Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend.

1. Two weeks ago I wrote about two graphs that really surprised me. One showed the correlation between overall school achievement and socioeconomic status of students in those schools. Spoiler: it’s strong. The other showed the correlation between schools’ learning rates and socioeconomic status. Spoiler: there is none.

2. These graphs surprised me because the dominant narrative is that “poor” schools suck and wealthier schools don’t. The first graph reinforces that. But, as the second graph shows, if we judge schools by learning rate, that dominant narrative gets refuted.

3. Sean Reardon, one of the very smart folks from EdOpportunity.org (the source for the graphs) and who’s also a professor at Stanford, wrote a piece that explores this counter-narrative more. Below are a few additional thoughts I have based on this data.

4. First, these graphs should put to rest any racist, classist, sexist, and eugenicist arguments that certain groups of students can’t learn. They can.

5. Second, we need need to invest in education for ages 0-4 (Grades 0 - PreK). I wrote more about this here.

6. In short, much of the inequity in educational outcomes is created well before students reach kindergarten, the de facto educational starting line in most of the US. Any practitioner who’s worked with kindergarteners will tell you they come with a huge range of skills — some students don’t know letter names while others can read independently.

7. Creating more equitable opportunities before kindergarten would be transformative in helping students reach the starting line ready to race. It would undoubtedly improve overall achievement outcomes, especially in schools that serve students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

8. Third, we need to revamp our approach to grading schools. The Yelps of education, sites like Niche.com and GreatSchools.org, offer up school ratings that are still too heavily steeped in overall academic achievement.

9. Consider the case of Rio del Valle Middle School (RDVMS). If you click on that link, it takes you to Niche.com’s rating, which gives the school a C-. I think most parents would be disappointed to have their child in a C-minus-rated school. GreatSchools.org rates it a 5 out 10, which is basically an F (don’t get me started on grading). That’s awful!

10. But look here at their learning rates: students there learned 38% more each grade than the US average from 2009 - 2018. That’s amazing!

    

11. Some caveats: first, the ratings sites are using current data and the learning rates data is older. Schools undergo drastic changes so it’s possible RVDMS really does stink right now. But I don’t think that’s the case. Check out California’s School Dashboard — there’s plenty of evidence of great learning happening there. Second, and more importantly: academic progress shouldn’t be the only way we rate schools. Students’ safety, extracurriculars, student/staff satisfaction — even the quality of the food served in the cafeteria — all are important indicators of a school’s quality.

12. School ratings sites need to do better. GreatSchools.org even acknowledges this on their site: We recognize that how well a school serves students from historically marginalized populations goes beyond test scores. A mounting body of evidence suggests that in comparison to just end-of-year test scores, student progress — or growth — is a more accurate way to measure how much value a school is adding for its students. Yes, many now include some measure of academic progress, but it’s unclear to the casual visitor how that’s weighted in comparison to other measures, like overall achievement.

13. Giving schools these bad grades reinforces negative racial stereotypes and drives prospective parents elsewhere, furthering a cycle of socioeconomic and racial segregation in our schools. And that’s something we could do without.

Thanks for reading. Have a lovely Friday and an even better weekend.

Here’s the first graph, which shouldn’t be very surprising. It compares students’ average test scores (the y-axis) to the level of poverty in their schools (the x-axis). Levels of poverty are measured by the percentage of students in a school who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Each bubble/dot represents a specific school in the US, and the size of the bubble/dot is related to the school’s enrollment.

Here’s the second graph. This one really shocked me. Instead of comparing overall test performance to levels of poverty, it compares students rates of learning (y-axis) to the level of poverty in their school (which is still measured by the percentage of students qualifying for free/reduced-price lunch) on the x-axis.

It’s also important to note that if we sort the learning rate data by districts instead of schools, a clearer trend line emerges.

Thanks for reading — have a great weekend!

1. According to a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article, there are over 380 billion ways to customize your Starbucks latte. Yes, 380 billion.

2. The customization craze has dedicated TikTok pages that teach Starbucks fanatics how to optimize their customizations and create unique “coffee” drinks (on this, dear reader, I must stand my ground — most of these are not coffee!).

3. The customization craze has also led to decreased worker productivity and increased worker stress at Starbucks. Baristas, according to the article, are struggling to keep up with the demands of hyper-personalized “coffee” drinks.

4. This got me thinking about the increasing demand for more “customized” learning and the challenges it levies on teachers. In education, “customization” takes three main forms: differentiation, personalized learning, and individualized education plans (IEPs).

5. Differentiation is generally used to describe how a teacher takes a standard lesson and “customizes” it for the needs of groups of learners within a class. We might differentiate a lesson on multiplication by using manipulatives for students who struggle with numeracy, and by incorporating advanced word problems for savvy mathematicians. Teachers are expected to differentiate nearly all their lessons.

6. Personalized learning typically refers to, ironically, computer programs (not persons!) that adapt lessons to students strengths and weaknesses. Software like iReady, for example, will adjust its math lessons to target a student’s area of growth regardless of their grade level — say a 6th grade student still needing extra practice with long division. Nearly every classroom utilizes some form of personalized learning software, and teachers are expected to analyze the resulting data and adjust their teaching accordingly.

7. Individualized education plans, or IEPs, are typically used for students with an identified learning disability. We broadly call this “special education,” and roughly 15% of students have some form of an IEP. Teachers are legally obligated to follow a child’s IEP.

8. If teaching reading is rocket science (it is!), which subject is an apt metaphor for teaching a differentiated reading lesson to a class of 30 students, incorporating data from the personalized learning software to customize it even more all while further customizing the lesson for the 5 students with individualized education plans each with 6 different accommodations? Theoretical physics? Quantum mechanics? My 7th grade PE class that had us run a mile and then tested me on the number of pull-ups I could do while the entire class watched? (It was zero, in case you’re wondering.)

9. I’m not sure if there are 380 billion ways a lesson might be customized for students, but I do know that teaching multiplication is more complex than making a Frappucino. Regardless, the rise of customization in education requires teachers to do more at a time when we know they’re already experiencing burnout at record levels. According to a recent study of 490 special education teachers, those for whom customization is the core of their job, “Over 60% scored at the dangerous level in emotional exhaustion (i.e., burnout).” That’s concerning.

10. Customizing instruction according to IEPs is often a teacher’s biggest challenge — the documents themselves are long, the suggested accommodations overgeneralized, and teachers rarely have enough planning time or instructional time to make the necessary adjustments. In that sense, the implementation of IEPs can often feel ceremonial. The challenge of customization via IEPs will likely increase as more districts push for inclusion models, where students with IEPs spend the majority of their time in “general” education classrooms alongside their neurotypical peers.

11. Starbucks is responding to the customization crisis by incorporating more technology to automate drink preparation and speed up service: the Clover Vertica, which can produce a cup of coffee in 30 seconds, and portable cold foam blenders. But innovation at Starbucks comes with a profit motive. Executives estimate that “serving just five extra customers a day in every store could boost annual revenue by more than $900 million.”

12. Public education isn’t driven by that same profit motive, and innovations have done little to make work easier for teachers and other school employees. What’s clear is that more is needed. Perhaps AI can be leveraged to write lesson plans or adapt IEPs into straightforward instructional moves. Or maybe we just need smaller classrooms or more teachers. As New York City Starbucks barista Zoe Custer said, “It’s like, ‘Oh, you need to be more personable, more this, more that. Well, we’re already stretching ourselves, because we don’t have enough people.”

13. A final note: Starbucks surged into U.S. pop culture as a fascimile of Italian espresso bar culture: come in, order a coffee, and stick around to read the newspaper and chat with friends or strangers. Now, though, “74% of orders are drive-thru, mobile or delivery.” Is this further evidence of our increasing disconnection as a society as we shop online, work from home, order delivery, stream new movies, spend less time in church, and ride our Pelotons? I’ve been increasingly wondering (over my morning cup of homebrewed coffee) if schools may be the last hope for building community in our society.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week.

1. The Times published “US Students’ Progress Stagnated Last School Year, Study Finds.” Briefly, the article focuses on this report published by NWEA, which shows that students made slower growth this past year in math and reading than similar students prior to the pandemic.

2. Despite billions of federal dollars spent to help make up for pandemic-related learning loss, progress in reading and math stalled over the past school year for elementary and middle-school students, according to a new national study released on Tuesday.

   1. This lede suggests that the billions of federal dollars were wasted. I’m not sure we can conclude that just yet. And we already underinvest in public education (and many other public goods).

3. In fact, students in most grades showed slower than average growth in math and reading, when compared with students before the pandemic. That means learning gaps created during the pandemic are not closing — if anything, the gaps may be widening.

   1. If true, this is certainly concerning. Keep in mind, though, that this is just one testing company’s internal data, though. And that we’re comparing students who experienced one of the most calamitous societal events in the last few decades to students who had never experienced such a catastrophe. Another thing to be cautious about here: the study is based on NWEA’s RIT scores. NWEA sells one of the most popular K-12 assessments, the MAP test. They use students’ RIT scores in drawing the conclusions above. What is a RIT score, you might be asking. Great question. There’s a whole section of their website dedicated to explaining it. I’m not suggesting the data isn't accurate, I’m just pointing out their financial stakes and the complexity of the raw data.

4. On average, students need the equivalent of an additional 4.5 months of instruction in math, and an extra four months in reading to catch up to the typical prepandemic student.

   1. The focus on “months of schooling” isn’t helpful. We don’t have that much more time to carve out for learning, and even if we did, I’m fairly certain the law of diminishing/negative returns would kick in. I’ve worked in schools with extended school days — 7.30 - 5.00 — it’s miserable for teachers and students. Maybe less could be more?

5. The question for educators and federal officials is how to address the four-month gap. Few academic interventions — standard tutoring, summer school, smaller class sizes — are powerful enough by themselves.

   1. A few years ago, I told my assistant superintendent that I wanted to carve out more time for interventions during the school day. “More interventions?” he asked. “Rob, 70% of the students are below proficient in reading. You need to address the root cause.” It was sobering — we weren’t going to intervene our way to success, and neither will we do so in this case. We need to rethink our standard approach to education, especially the narrow focus on reading and math scores. We’ve already narrowed the curriculum so much that reading and math blocks in elementary schools comprise nearly 80% of the instructional day. Most teachers are lucky to sneak in a few poorly-planned minutes of science and social studies instruction. I’m optimistic we can improve student outcomes with a more robust and expansive curriculum — along with many other fundamental changes to our system.

6. Recovery plans have varied widely across thousands of school districts in the United States, with little national accounting of how the money has been spent.

   1. Yes, this is a major problem. I alluded to this in my post about the airline industry — we need to do a better job of coordinating across districts and implementing SOPs (standard operating procedures). Imagine if we had a standard procedure for responding to extended virtual learning. We’d focus our efforts on what works.

7. Research suggests that high-dosage tutoring — which pairs a trained tutor with one to four students, at least three times a week, for a full year — can produce gains equivalent to about four months of learning.

   1. Yes, high-dosage tutoring can be helpful and we should consider more of it. And it’s also very costly and labor intensive — finding high-quality tutors isn’t easy, and there are only so many hours in the day to tutor students.

8. Above all, I worry that reports like this push education leaders and policy makers to focus on more of the same — a hyper-intensive and misguided focus on only math and reading instruction that crowds out other engaging learning opportunities for students. When the pandemic first struck and students were fully remote, there was so much talk about “this is an opportunity to reimagine our education system!” That seems to have evaporated, leaving behind a residue of the same old stuff: summer school, tutoring, and more math and reading instruction.

9. My hometown’s paper of record, The Inquirer, reported on a study by my alma mater, Penn State, that showed an increase in principals leaving their posts. Ironically, I’m likely included in the study’s dataset since I left my principalship last July. That job was easily the best, most challenging, and longest role I’ve ever held in education. Let’s analyze some quotes from the article.

10. …a stable principal’s office might matter even more to a school’s success, said Ed Fuller…Principals affect not just teacher turnover, but also school climate and student achievement, he noted.

    1. This can’t be overstated. Principals have the ability to help teachers and students do their best, and schools that see excessive turnover struggle because there are few reasons to trust the leader will be there next year. It took years for me to convince my staff to trust me — and building trust is a journey, not a destination.

11. “The work was already difficult, but it’s intensified to such a degree that it becomes not worth it for a lot of people,” said Cooper, a veteran administrator [and president of a principals’ union] herself. “People are choosing their mental health, and when they can get out, they’re getting out.”

    1. It’s difficult work, for sure, and the study doesn’t indicate why principals are leaving. My primary reason for leaving wasn’t my mental health — it was to further my education so I help principals and everyone they serve.

12. Principals at schools with highest concentration of students of color were more prone to leave their jobs than principals at more racially diverse schools, and charter school principals were more likely to depart than leaders of traditional public schools — there was a 32.8% attrition rate for charter school principals, and 13.2% for traditional public school principals.

    1. Truly disheartening data points, and further evidence of inequities in our system. Charter school principals generally have fewer labor protections and, as a result, less job security.

13. To fix high principal attrition rates, Fuller said, districts and policymakers should increase principal salaries, provide incentives for those principals who take on hard-to-staff schools, and launch a statewide principal working conditions survey to better understand what makes principals leave — and stay — in Pennsylvania schools.

    1. Money isn’t the answer. I’d start with improving principal supervision and the supports provided to schools by central offices. All the money in the world can’t make the work easier, and I think most principals would stay longer if they felt supported and had a better work/life balance.

We had a few run-ins with turbulence, but an otherwise safe flight to Seattle. Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend!

1. A few months back I was driving through suburban Indianapolis (visiting my wife’s family) and noticed two huge flight simulators through the glass windows of a newly-constructed building off Highway 31.

2. I began thinking about the flight we had just taken to get to Indy — a turbulent, two-hour ride from Boston — and feeling grateful that our pilots successfully navigated the choppy conditions. They even reassured us several times throughout the flight: nothing to worry about, folks.

3. Pilots are required to spend at least two days in a flight simulator every six months to maintain their license. They spend that time practicing normal takeoffs and landings as well as “non-regular” events, like an engine failure at takeoff.

4. Years ago, the airline industry came together to prioritize safety. They view it as fundamental to their business. After all, no one wants to get on an airplane if there’s a reasonable chance they won’t survive. That collective effort to prioritize safety has yielded an incredible track record. According to a study from MIT, the rate of fatalities “is now one death per 7.9 million passenger boardings, compared to one death per 2.7 million boardings during the period 1998-2007, and one death per 1.3 million boardings during 1988-1997.”

5. While our progress in improving literacy and math outcomes has remained relatively flat in the last three decades, flying has gotten nearly 7 times safer. In education, we tolerate teachers struggling through their first few years — essentially using students as their training apparatus. But airlines don’t tolerate that level of failure. So what can we learn from this?

6. More teacher training. This isn’t a new or novel idea, but using something like flight simulators is. Last year I wrote about the potential for using the Metaverse to train teachers. The latest developments in AI make it realistic to design “classroom simulators” that mirror the normal and non-normal events teachers might encounter in classrooms. In addition to their annual simulator training, pilots need to have at least 1500 hours of flying experience before getting hired by a commercial airline. Teachers, on the other hand, can be hired without so much as a college degree (yes, only in some states…but still!).

7. Embrace standardization. Standard operating procedures, or SOPs, are, well, standard in aviation — they’re used by pilots, air traffic controllers, and flight attendants to dictate their responses to all sorts of events. Not so much in teaching. As a principal in Philadelphia, a district with almost 200 schools, I remember having to devise my own system for report-card conferences. That time could’ve been better spent building relationships with parents. We need more standardized ways of operating schools and teaching students how to write and learn fractions. Far too often we leave these decisions to individual districts, principals, and teachers because of the false dichotomy that education is either an art or science.

8. Embrace technology. It’s no secret that modern airplanes use a lot of automation. From weather radar, traffic collision avoidance systems, ground proximity warning systems, and auto-

   trim systems, computers have enabled pilots to increase their “situational awareness” by freeing up their attention. We can embrace similar technology in education — utilizing some of the computer-adaptive instructional programs to give teachers real-time feedback about what students need and allowing them to “course-correct.”

9. More time for teachers. Most commercial flights have two pilots — that’s two brains to read and analyze the flight data and make adjustments. Most US classrooms have just one teacher to analyze the data. In the short-term, it’s unrealistic to double our teaching force, but we can provide teachers more time to analyze data and lesson plan accordingly (they do it in Iceland!).

10. Share data. Airlines share a lot of data about safety. The jet engines strapped to the wings of most commercial aircraft produce nearly a terabyte of data during a flight. This and other data gets pooled and analyzed by the airline industry, helping them more adeptly identify early warning indicators and prevent mechanical issues. There are around 14,000 school districts in the country, and nearly all have proprietary data that they use to launch new initiatives each year to improve instruction. Instead of launching isolated initiatives, districts should be launching collective ventures to improve instruction. That might start with pooling their data to better understand trends and prevent students from failing. State governments and even private foundations can incentivize districts to do this through policy adjustments and financial rewards.

11. Embrace unions. The airline industry is heavily unionized. At 3 of the 4 major carriers (Southwest, American, and United), between 80-85% of the workforce are unionized. Flight attendants, pilots, and mechanics — all participate in collective bargaining. And those bargaining units don’t just advocate for better pay, they also negotiate for safer working conditions. We love to pillory teacher unions for our stagnant achievement — and while we do need unions to modernize — they’re an ally, not an obstacle.

12. More coordination. Dozens of workers are responsible for getting flights to depart safely: mechanics, gate agents, meteorologists, air traffic controllers, baggage handlers, pilots, flight attendants, and others. Too often districts, especially large ones, work in silos, failing to support principals and teachers in getting new initiatives off the ground (pun intended). As Professor Honig argues in that previously-cited paper, central offices might be due for a redesign to better support teaching and learning.

13. On Wednesday morning, my son and I are jumping on a flight to Seattle. I’m still an anxious flier, but I’m more assured knowing how hard airlines work to keep us safe. Now if they could do something about all the fees…

Thanks for reading. Have a great week.

1. Last fall, a Twitter user tweeted a photo of Elon Musk looking toned and muscular. “What’s your secret?” the user asked. Musk was quick to respond: “Fasting. And Wegovy.”

2. Wegovy is a prescription weight-loss drug modeled after another drug, Ozempic, that was originally designed to help individuals with type 2 diabetes and that’s now become the glam-drug of Hollywood elite. According to some reports, these semaglutides, as they’re commonly called, are being dealt in wealthy circles like kids exchanging bags of Takis in the cafeteria. Jimmy Kimmel even teased fellow celebrities about it. Individuals that take these drugs lose weight — and fast. Unfortunately, they must also confront some side effects — diarrhea, hair loss, vomiting, constipation, dizziness, nausea — and they tend to gain the weight right back after they stop taking the drugs.

3. What does this have to do with ending the achievement plateau in public education? In many ways, our nation’s obesity epidemic mirrors our nation’s challenges in education. Nearly 40% of adults qualify as obese, and similarly high percentages of students fail to meet basic proficiency standards in reading and math. Obesity, like poor math and reading skills, is correlated with lots of negative health outcomes. Both tend to be concentrated in areas with deep poverty. And both seem, despite many years of large-scale interventions, intractable.

4. Ozempic’s meteoric rise in popularity as an obesity treatment mirrors the rise of a similar intervention for our public education epidemic: high-dosage tutoring is regularly touted as a breakthrough “drug” for helping underperforming students.

5. Like Ozempic, tutoring can be really effective. Supporters often point to this meta-analysis that shows tutoring has a strong impact — about .37 standard deviations. That’s equivalent to losing a significant amount of weight very quickly. What the meta-analysis doesn’t show, though, are the potential side effects.

6. Like Ozempic, high-dosage tutoring is also really expensive. It requires adults, typically teachers or trained paraprofessionals, working with students in small groups (1:1 or 1:3 at most). This EdWeek article cited a study of a Chicago-based tutoring program that cost $3800 per student. That’s more than 10% of Chicago’s per pupil spending. Tacking on such a hefty increase seems unsustainable given our country’s reluctance to properly fund education.

7. Like Ozempic, we also don’t know much about complications from prolonged use. High-dosage tutoring may help to undo some of the acute learning loss caused by the pandemic, and I question its ability to be a long-term solution to the consistently low academic achievement in most districts serving disadvantaged students.

8. Why? With Ozempic, once the intervention is removed, the effect diminishes or goes away completely — people regain the weight rather quickly. I’d expect similar results with high-dosage tutoring. Because it’s so costly, it’s often paid for with ARPA dollars. Those funds will run out eventually, and only wealthier districts will be able to afford to pay for tutoring. And the potential side effects of teacher burnout worry me. Last year, even with unlimited dollars to pay teachers to stay late and tutor students, most of the teachers at my school just wanted to go home when the school bell rang. (I did too)

9. Let me be clear: I’m not here to demonize weight loss drugs. Losing weight is really difficult, primarily because we live in a calorie-rich environment. Highly caloric foods are everywhere. This calorie-rich environment exploits our genetic predispositions to carry extra weight for survival (see: epigenetics). To combat obesity long-term, we need to either change the environment or adjust how the brain interacts with it.

10. As someone who was obese for the better part of my adolescence, I’ve spent a lot of mental, emotional, cognitive, and physical energy trying to lose weight in my life. It’s exhausting. I’ve listened to numerous podcasts and watched countless YouTube videos on Ozempic — it has been positively life-changing for some individuals. If there’s a medical intervention with limited/acceptable side effects, why shouldn’t people take it?

11. There’s a similar dynamic at play in public education. Students who grow up in academic deserts — areas bereft of libraries, early childhood education, highly-educated parents, and lagging community-supported extracurricular activities — start behind and often stay behind.

12. Consider how hard it is for those students who struggle in school. Even the youngest students know when they’re struggling with reading or math and others aren’t. Just like getting on a scale can elicit anger and sadness, seeing “below basic” on their progress reports can cause all kinds of difficult emotions. So we should be searching for miracle cures that have the capacity to change their lives.

13. I’m also not hear to demonize high-dosage tutoring. There are some organizations, like the Minnesota Reading Corps, that are doing life-changing work for students. My fear is that this latest intervention will further exacerbate the disparity between rich and poor districts. Even as we strive for equity, we still have a public education system largely built on local funding, meaning wealthier districts can easily afford the latest and greatest intervention while the rest of us are forced to count calories, hit our step goal, and feel guilty, embarrassed, and angry when we fall short.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week.

1. On Friday, the 17th-largest bank in the United States got taken over by state regulators. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), famous for being a cash parking lot for tech startups, got gobbled up by a bank run. A stock that was worth $597.16 a share at one point in the last year, is now worth nothing.

2. Ever since I opened my first account at Mellon PSFS, I remember seeing the FDIC sign on the door of every bank. It said my money was protected by the “full faith and credit of the United States government” — as long as I didn’t deposit more than $250,000. Reliant for income at the time on the tooth fairy, Easter egg hunts, and my birthday, I didn’t think that’d be an issue.

3. For many a tech company, though, the SVB bank run was an issue. About $8 billion of SVB’s $173 billion in deposits exceeded that insured limit. That was enough to prompt many politicians, wealthy individuals, and others on Twitter — both Republicans and Democrats — to call for all depositors to be made whole. Anything less, they said, would lead to systemic economic issues and widespread financial doom.

4. Even though some disagreed with that prediction, in less than 72 hours the federal government had mobilized and found a way to ensure that all deposits beyond the insured threshold of $250,000 would be “made whole.” Taxpayers won’t foot the bill, we’ve been told. At worst, I’m skeptical. At best, I understand tax dollars to pay the salaries of the thousands of government officials who worked on this deal, rendering that statement inaccurate.

5. It’s astonishing how willing we are to leverage the power of the collective — be it banks or taxpayers — to prevent “systemic” problems that might result from the downfall of institutions that benefit wealthy individuals.

6. If only we were as willing to leverage the power of the collective to prevent other systemic problems that result from the underfunding of institutions that benefit the poor and working class.

7. In 2013, the US Department of Education estimated it would cost nearly $200 billion to bring all school facilities to good standing. Has that been “made whole?”

8. The School District of Philadelphia suffered several massive budget deficits in the late 90s ($200 million), early 2000s ($73 million), and mid 2010s ($695 million). The latter led to the layoff of over 3000 district staff members. It’s likely the underfunding of the district has caused numerous systemic problems — violence, racism, poverty, physical and mental health challenges for the students it was serving during those many decade. The district and those children still have not been “made whole.”

9. The water system in Jackson, MS continues to be unreliable and possibly tainted with poisonous lead. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey destroyed the homes of thousands in Houston who lacked flood insurance. I haven’t yet seen a clamoring on Twitter for the federal government swoop in and guarantee they all be “made whole.”

10. Our collective ability to avoid collective solutions to systemic problems that don’t line the pockets of wealthy individuals is, at best, disappointing. At worst, it’s downright despicable. Writing in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, columnist Andy Kessler grossly opined, “In its proxy statement, SVB notes that besides 91% of their board being independent and 45% women, they also have “1 Black,” “1 LGBTQ+” and “2 Veterans.” I’m not saying 12 white men would have avoided this mess, but the company may have been distracted by diversity demands.” Systemic financial ruin = real, systemic racism = fake. You see the pattern.

11. I believe in the power of the collective. I believe in systemic issues. Though I’m not a die-hard advocate of this, I don’t mind if all the SVB depositors who made uninsured deposits get their money back. I just want something in return.

12. I want us to believe that the power of the collective can dismantle systemic racism as effectively as it can prevent financial ruin for tech startups. I want us to believe that the systemic underfunding of school systems and the neighborhoods they serve has also had catastrophic consequences: addiction, homelessness, surging violence — entrenched poverty and all the fixings that come with it.

13. On Monday, President Biden pledged to do “whatever is needed” to uphold the banking system. "Your deposits will be there when you need them," he said. Now if he would just replace “banking” with “public education” and “deposits” with “schools,” I think our country might be “made whole.”

Thanks for reading. Have a great week.

1. $4400 each month. That’s what my wife and I pay each month for preschool for our two boys, ages 3 and 7 months.

2. $154 each month. That’s the maximum cost (per child) each month for preschool in Sweden.

3. The cost of childcare is beyond burdensome in some parts of the U.S. Here in Boston, childcare accounts for over 28% of the median family income.

4. The U.S. is far behind other countries in providing free, high-quality early childhood education, and the consequences of this foster the inequity that’s rampant in our society.

5. The failure to provide high-quality, early-childhood education puts an unnecessary burden on our K-12 public education system, particularly for students from low-income families who can’t afford preschool. In my previous role as a literacy director for a regional charter network, data showed that upwards of 50% of students arrived in kindergarten without the ability to recognize letters of the alphabet. The recent waves of 3rd grade literacy laws are a nice PR stunt, but our focus should be on preparing students to read before they get to kindergarten.

6. It also limits the ability of women – who most often serve as primary childcare – to re-enter the workforce and continue their careers. And it financially trammels parents – who pay too much – and childcare workers – who earn too little. 

7. The benefits of high-quality early education aren’t just financial. Getting students into high-quality programs at an early age provides indisputable cognitive, social, and emotional benefits.

8. Just two years ago, the U.S was close to improving access to free, high-quality early childhood education. The original Build Back Better (BBB) federal legislation proposal contained a funding package for universal preschool across the country. Much of it was legislatively similar to the proposal passed in Multnomah County, Oregon (aka, Portland). 

9. Despite its overwhelmingly popularity – more than 70% of Republicans and 90+% of Democrats favor free or heavily-subsidized childcare options -- the childcare package was eliminated from the version of BBB that Congress passed and President Biden signed into law.

10. While I think universal preschool for ages 3+ is a great start, I’d like to see us go even further. The current version of what we consider “public education” education — our K-12 model — has only existed for a portion of our country’s history. Free public high school only emerged in the early 1900s. As we move through the early 2000s with new knowledge about the importance of early childhood development, we could (should!) expand our public model to start at age 1.

11. Gaps in the precursors to educational achievement — language processing and vocabulary — become visible as early as 18 months in families from different socioeconomic backgrounds. As this oft-cited study shows, by age 2 there was a 6-month-gap in language processing between wealthier and poorer students.

12. Why? There are myriad reasons, and one is most likely the high cost of early childhood education that limits access for poorer families. We can change that.

13. When I drop baby Sam off each morning, he’s surrounded by a team of amazing (and still likely underpaid) teachers who speak to him, read him books, play with him, challenge his motor skills, and shower him with love and kisses in ways that will benefit him for the rest of his life. It comes with a high price tag, but it shouldn’t.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week’s end and an even better weekend.

1. In January, a colleague and fellow doctoral candidate, Aaron Diaz, traveled to Iceland to visit their schools and learn from fellow educators there. We co-wrote the following post after I convinced Aaron that writing in numbered lists is actually writing.

2. In Iceland, all three schools politely requested we remove our shoes inside the school.  At first, we were surprised, having never walked a US public school in our socks, despite toe shoes being Rob’s preferred shoe.  However, with a quick glance around, I noticed ALL students were roaming the halls in socks. Most teachers were either in socks or were wearing some “inside shoes” like slippers, slides, or simply sneakers. This is what the entrance to the school looked like:

   

   It’s as much practical — shoes track all the dirty snow in — as it is exemplary of the culture within the schools.

3. In our first visit, the principal — an amazing and veteran educator — was describing the school facilities.  He said, “There are four houses…” At first we thought he was referring to the house structure some schools follow. Not the case. Referring to a school as a house is not just a matter of words in Iceland. A “building” can refer to any number of places: a factory, a store, a post office.  But a house is where people live. A house is where families spend time together and support each other through tough times and good times. Isn’t that what school should be?

4. Teachers as professionals. Across the US, states are taking extraordinary measures to recruit more teachers, as colleges graduate fewer and fewer students from teacher preparation programs. That means slashing traditional requirements, like a teaching license or an advanced degree, to rush individuals through emergency certification pipelines. Iceland seems to be moving in the opposite direction, having recently required a Master’s degree for all teachers.

5. Commensurate with that is the amount of time teachers get to do their work. A full-time teacher in Iceland teaches 1040 minutes each week, or twenty-six, forty-minute periods. But actual teaching is only a fraction of a teacher’s work. Teachers in Iceland also get 20 minutes of preparation time for every 40 minutes they teach. That’s 520 minutes of prep time each week. For context, K-8 teachers in Philadelphia were only allotted 225 minutes of planning time each week. That’s not even enough time to plan all their lessons, let alone data analysis, grading, parent communications, and using the bathroom. Even with their lunch period, most US teachers fall well short of the prep time afforded to Icelandic teachers. 

6. There’s also a distinct culture among staff. We ate lunch with the principal in the staff breakroom, surrounded by loads of other teachers, paraprofessionals, and building staff who chatted and sipped on the freshly-brewed coffee. The staff lounges themselves resembled something of a fancy tech office, with espresso machines and endless bubbly water. If the principal walked into the breakroom of a typical US school, I’d imagine every teacher would either leave or just stop talking. That culture of distrust wasn’t present during our visits.

7. Playskool. Iceland provides heavily subsidized, early-childhood education for kids starting at age 1. Parents pay a small fee and over 98% of eligible children attend Playskool.  Providing high-quality, early-childhood education is critical: it alleviates childcare-related financial burdens on new parents and provides all kinds of cognitive benefits for students. In the US we’re hyper-focused on ensuring all students are proficient readers by 3rd grade by emphasizing rigor and more phonics in grades K-2. While this goal remains elusive here, especially in high-poverty areas, literacy rates in Iceland are sky-high. Maybe we should start focusing on what kids learn before they get to kindergarten.

8. Icelandic schools are built around the country’s Six Pillars of education: health and wellbeing, literacy, democracy and human rights, sustainability, equality, creativity. While education reform policy has pushed US schools to an increasingly narrow (and misguided) focus on math and literacy, Iceland seemed to be doing the opposite. Sure, all students had a daily, 40-minute period of Icelandic literacy. But the Six Pillars’ curriculum was more robust and engaging

9. Health and wellbeing. Icelanders love pools. It’s common for folks to gather at the community pool – which features thermally-heated hot tubs and cold plunges – before or after work to socialize. “It’s much better than going to the bar on a Tuesday,” said our colleague in the Ministry of Education. Debatable, but I see his point. That culture of health and wellbeing starts in schools, where all students take swimming lessons each week. Sport is featured heavily, as well. Icelandic schools each send a student to a crossfit-like competition each year, Skólahreysti. And schools teach about healthy eating with actual cooking classes. We walked through classrooms that were indistinguishable from a professional kitchen. At one point, a group of 4th graders scurried around us holding trays of warm muffins. “They only had 40 minutes from start to finish,” the teacher joked. 

10. Creativity. Each of the three schools we visited had a carpentry studio complete with hand tools (saws, screwdrivers, hammers) and power tools (bandsaws, drill presses, and jigsaws). Schools also featured several visual art studios, which helped me understand why art galleries were featured prominently throughout Reykjavik's entertainment district.

11. Sustainability. Iceland is fortunate to have relatively easy access to geothermal energy. Nearly all homes are heated with geothermal energy. But sustainability is more than just energy production and consumption. There were no disposable lunch trays or plastic utensils in the cafeterias. Students used plastic and ceramic dishware and steel utensils which they placed on dish racks after eating. Even the teacher lounges had dish racks to wash the coffee mugs and lunch plates. 

12. Equality. Icelanders call principals by their first names. Most school staff were casually dressed, making it difficult to distinguish teachers from students, and admin from teachers. The formal hierarchy that exists in US public education and gets reinforced through titles and formal communication was nowhere to be found.

13. Democracy and human rights. All students learn at least two other languages in school, typically English and Danish (Iceland was a part of the Kingdom of Denmark until the 1900s). We didn’t meet a single Icelander who couldn’t speak fluent English. It’s been said that monolingualism is the illiteracy of the 21st century (though some tech wonks might argue that coding is literacy), and it does allow individuals to take a more empathic stance towards other countries and cultures, something US students — and society — could certainly benefit from.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week.

1. In November of 2022, OpenAI launched an updated version of its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven chatbot, ChatGPT.

2. If you missed this bit of news, ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is basically a bot that a person can ask a question or give a command to and it will use its massive database to provide a (often startlingly accurate) response. It has been asked to write poetry, obituaries, college essays, and provide relationship advice, and its work is often indistinguishable from the average human.

3. Most importantly, ChatGPT has generated plenty of hilarious memes, and that got me wondering: what are its implications for public education?

4. In the immediate future, teachers can incorporate its power into their lessons. It might be used to promote a class discussion or generate ideas for an essay. Writing teachers might use it to provide a model essay that could be revised by students. Social studies teachers might provide students prompts for it, and then have them factcheck the bot’s answers. Teachers of English-learners might use it to have students test their English out by chatting with it.

5. Overworked teachers might even consider using it to write their lesson plans, and central offices could use AI chatbots to more quickly respond to parent concerns.

6. All these raise an even more ominous question: if artificial intelligence bots can write basic lesson plans and help students practice skills, at what point could AI replace teachers altogether? ChatGPT reportedly passed medical licensing exams, so passing the PRAXIS shouldn’t be too challenging. And it’s not hard to imagine a class on Zoom or in the Metaverse being taught by a quasi-sentient AI-based “teacher.”

7. And if it can pass tests and potentially take over entire professions, that begs an even more fundamental question: what the hell are we even doing in public schools?

8. There’s a famous essay by David Labaree, now an education professor at Stanford, in which he examines the three purposes of public education in the US: preparing citizens, preparing workers, and promoting social mobility. It’s a long read, and well worth your time.

9. We often hear about education as attempting to prepare students for 21st century jobs — the “preparing workers” goal of education — and I think it’s time we stop pretending that we know what “jobs” will look like even 10 years from now. Technology often advances exponentially (thanks, Moore’s Law), and given the current capabilities of ChatGPT, it’s reasonable to think that in 10 years artificial intelligence will be doing much more than entertaining us with quirky rap songs in the style of Eminem.

10. I think education serves a more basic purpose, more aligned with the “preparing citizens” goal: it builds community. I am increasingly concerned at our society’s ability to promote isolationism: more of us work from home, order groceries and clothes to be delivered to our homes, which in turn serve as fitness clubs and movie theaters. The reasons to leave our homes and join in community are becoming fewer.

11. But nearly everyone still goes to school. Perhaps that’s our one opportunity to teach students how to build relationships, support one another, find beauty in the world, and purpose for themselves that includes more than just getting a job.

12. Creating this system would require a wholesale change in our approach. The quality of our public education system is most often judged by students’ performance on standardized tests in math and reading, which have helped narrow the function of schools to test-prep factories while stressing the system at every level.

13. Still, it can be done. I traveled to Iceland recently to visit schools and saw it happening there. Translating it to the US would “require the attention of policy makers, educators, and other experts in the field, not a language model.” Even ChatGPT gets it.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week.

1. Dear Readers, it’s been nearly 3 months since my last post, and these are my sins…

2. School has been busy. Turns out getting a doctorate at Harvard requires a lot of reading and writing. Who knew?

3. Raising kids is exhausting (and great!). My wife and I haven’t slept through the night since July nor had a fever-free week since October. But the boys are healthy and in school (daycare) today.

4. I wrote and submitted my last final on Friday, and I’ve got a few weeks until classes resume, so I’m excited to start writing again.

5. What better topic to restart this newsletter (blog?) than grammar. Well, not grammar grammar, like the kind you learned in language arts class if you went to Catholic School like I did.

6. Rather, I’m talking about what David Tyack and Larry Cuban call the “grammar of schooling” in Chapter 4 of their seminal text on education reform, Tinkering Towards Utopia. Among the thousands of pages I’ve read this semester, I highly encourage this one if you’re interested in exploring the history of education reform.

7. The “grammar of schooling” refers to the traditions that dictate how school looks and feels, from the way grades are organized by age, to the way subjects are sectioned off and taught in isolation, to the way grades are assigned and students are seated. As Tyack and Cuban note, the “grammar of schooling” has remained “remarkably stable over the decades.”

8. Aside from swapping Tandy 2000s for Macbook Airs and trips to confession for trips to the museum, the K-8 school I led up until June of 2022 looked almost identical to the K-8 school I attended until June of 1996.

9. This template for schools has been difficult to revise. As Tyack and Cuban note, innovations to create ungraded schools, utilize space in a flexible manner, merge subjects, and encourage teacher collaboration have mostly been stymied.

10. Consider the history of the graded school, in which students are organized by age-bound grades. Despite early concerns that it might lead to more drop-outs and a narrow curriculum focused on end-of-year tests, it has stood the test of time since the 1870s after making obsolete the one-room school and the large, mixed-age classroom led by a master teacher.

11. One of the more famous attempts to rethink the graded school was the Dalton Plan, developed in the 1920s by Helen Parkhurst, a teacher and school founder who was heavily influenced by Maria Montessori. The Dalton Plan focused on elevating student choice, with monthly contracts that outlined the minimum tasks students had to complete, as well as optional, enrichment tasks. Students went to laboratories (not classrooms) to complete their activities, and their progress was displayed on large charts showing their content mastery. At its high in the 1930s, several hundred schools followed the Dalton Plan, but it had all but disappeared by 1949.

12. So why is it so hard to sustain these innovative approaches to schooling, especially when so few of us deeply love the rigid structure of the current grammar of schooling and the system as a whole continues to underwhelm? Tyack and Cuban identify two common challenges: reform burnout and lack of political savvy. Changing the grammar of schooling requires enormous effort from educators to change their practice and that of students. It also requires support from citizens outside of education, many of whom get politically aggressive when traditions are threatened. Just look at the current outrage regarding Critical Race Theory and related book banning efforts.

13. Changing what happens inside schools is incredibly difficult. Nearly every student, teacher, parent, school board member and citizen has an imprint of what school should like (the one they attended as a child!). Attempts to deviate from that template might garner some interest but fade quickly. If we’re going to end The Achievement Plateau, though, we’ve got to do something different. And while the grammar of schooling might be intractable, I’m wondering if the grammar of central offices might be more malleable. More on that soon.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week. Go Birds.

1. The Philadelphia Eagles have played two games and won two games. That’s pretty good (#analysis), and it probably means we’re winning the Super Bowl.

2. Watching last night’s win over the Minnesota Vikings brought me back to this post I had started a while back in 2020 when the Eagles were awful.

3. At the time, way back in December of 2020, then-Head-Coach-Doug-Pederson started Jalen Hurts at quarterback over their well-paid, franchise player Carson Wentz. The team ran a competent offense, played aggressive defense despite losing personnel to injury after injury, and beat the New Orleans Saints, 24-21.

4. Part of their success at the time was in simplifying the offense for Hurts. In his post-game press conferences, Coach Pederson said, “We didn’t give him a lot of freedom in this game.”

5. This idea — narrowing the game plan — worked before for the Eagles. Pederson applied a similar approach in the Eagles 2018 Super Bowl run, when he had to extract the most from another backup quarterback, Nick Foles. He simplified the offense.

6. It got me thinking: Why simplify an offense for professional athletes who are paid handsomely and have been playing their position for years?

7. Running an (American) football offense is really complex. It requires a quarterback to internalize a large playbook, with each play containing 11 moving pieces and several options to adjust it at the line of scrimmage. It also requires the quarterback to properly read the defense in front of him, understanding whether they’re poised to blitz, attack the run, or drop back into pass coverage. Lots of variables to consider in a short amount of time leads to a lot of complexity in decision-making — and a lot of opportunities to make mistakes.

8. It’s not just Pederson who’s taken this approach. Coach Sean McVay, who won last year’s Super Bowl with the LA Rams, often says his offense is designed to give the “illusion of complexity,” while at its core, it’s simple for the players to understand and execute.

9. Running a classroom, a school, or a school system is no different. Consider the complexities with the current pandemic and the basic decision of whether or not schools should reopen. Leaders are having to compute variables about public health, the engineering of facilities, virology, epidemiology, politics, technology, mental health, and, oh yeah, actual teaching and learning.

10. In working with new teachers, I always encourage them to simplify their instruction. Create a simple, consistent schedule for your subject and stick to each day. For an ELA teacher, this look like this: 10 minutes of knowledge-building, 30 minutes of shared reading, 20 minutes of writing in response to reading, and

11. Simplifying one variable or domain allows leaders to focus on the variables that are changing before their eyes. We can control instruction much more than we can control students’ behavior, so why not simplify it?

12. Coach Pederson ended being fired a few weeks after he debuted Jalen Hurts. Head Coaches, much like principals and superintendents, often take the heat when performance lags.

13. But both seem to be finding success right now. Pederson has seemingly breathed new life into another struggling, young quarterback in Trevor Lawrence, perhaps by simplifying the offense. And Hurts is thriving under the Eagles’ new head coach, Nick Sirianni, who was notably criticized for saying the following at his introductory press conference: We’re going to…we’re going to know…we’re going to have systems in place that are easier to learn.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week. And “Go Birds.”

1. During the first day of school at many Philadelphia elementary schools, students had a breakfast menu complete with all the classics: French toast, breakfast sandwiches, cereal bars, fresh fruit and juice. (You can check the full menu here).

2. Lunch was similar. Here’s the lunch menu for this week, the second week of school.

   

3. Menus like the ones above are constructed like that (with entrees and sides) because schools that participate in the National School Breakfast/Lunch Program (free food) have to hit calorie requirements and offer vegetables and fruit and other “healthy” items. The full guidelines are here (they’re dense).

4. Most free lunch programs serve USDA Foods — food produced in the United States, categorized, and offered as a “meal product” (yummy!) by the USDA. In 2019, almost 30 million of the roughly 50 million public school students in the United States participated in the National School Lunch Program.

5. On the whole, these seem like decent menus, right? Yes there’s the guilty pleasures of French toast, pizza, hoagies, fish sticks, burgers, chips, tater tots, and chicken tenders that common sense tells us can’t be a daily staple in our diets.

6. But! There are fruits, vegetables, and salads offered every day! Not bad, right?!

7. Wrong. In my 6 years as a school principal, I rarely saw students choosing the healthy options. It’s hard to blame them.

8. The vegetables offered — savory corn, cucumbers, green beans, and carrots — are steamed and often flavorless. These aren’t the blistered brussel sprouts with bacon and creme fraiche you’re getting at your local gastropub, juiced up with fats to make them delicious — these are soulless, fibrous concoctions one chokes down when shredding for summer. No thanks.

9. The fruit that’s offered is generally unripened and flavorless. I love fruit, and when I was a principal there were often lots of tart apples, pale oranges, green bananas, and rocky pears left over from our lunch service. Even I couldn’t stand to take a bit of them.

10. Typically, most students are choosing those guilty pleasures: pizza, chicken tenders, fries or tots, and a juice. While they might be forced to put the other food on their plate — choosing a fruit and vegetable is sometimes required — much of it gets wasted. One study found students threw away over 50% of the food they were served. The World Wildlife Fund estimated this food waste amounts to over $1.7 billion every school year.

11. I’m not a nutritionist. I’m not a dietitian. I’m not a medical doctor. I not the authority on whether or not certain foods are “healthy,” a term that has many shades of meaning. But I do know this: I couldn’t eat foods like that — pizza, nuggets, tater tots — every day and still maintain a healthy weight.

12. And if you think students can, I would remind you that students get most of their daily calories from school. And we almost double the number of obese children as they progress from K through 12th grade in our public school system.

13. We can definitely do more to get students to eat healthy. Serving more palatable “healthy” foods is a good start — but without proper health and nutrition education, it’s probably not enough. Stay tuned for more on that next week.

Thanks for reading. Have a great — and flavorful — week.

1. “Childhood obesity is a serious problem in the United States, putting children and adolescents at risk for poor health. Obesity prevalence among children and adolescents is still too high.”

2. That statement, from the CDC’s webpage on obesity, doesn’t mince words. According to the Center’s data, almost 20% of U.S. children are obese — their Body Mass Index (BMI) ranks in the 95th percentile for their age.

3. What’s more concerning is that rates tend to increase as children grow up: when students enter our public education system, only about 13% qualify as obese. When they leave, more than 22% do. The trend continues into adulthood. Over 40% of Americans are obese — the highest mark in the world.

4. And even though we passed legislation in 2010 to try to improve the nutrition of school meals, obesity prevalence among youth has increased over the last decade — and the pandemic exacerbated the increase.

5. As I wrote last week regarding school discipline and criminal justice, schools alone can’t solve our obesity crisis — but they can play an important role. And that’s what I want to examine in this series.

6. Students eat as many as half their calories at school. And they spend almost half their waking hours at school. That means there’s an opportunity to not only change what they eat — there’s an opportunity to shape how they think about food, nutrition, exercise, and healthy living.

7. And by “healthy living” I don’t mean a chiseled, ready-for-Instagram physique. There’s an important distinction between looking physically fit and actually being healthy. And the obesity crisis is not (and should not be) just about body image: research suggests BMI can impact cognitive development. We know that obese Americans are also more likely to suffer severe effects of COVID-19, as well as a host of other conditions.

8. From the Organization for Economic Development (OECD): Obese children are at greater risk of developing hypertension and metabolic disorders. Psychologically, obesity can lead to poor self-esteem, eating disorders and depression. Further, obesity may act as a barrier for participating in educational and recreational activities

9. From the World Health Organization (WHO): Obesity poses a major risk for serious diet-related noncommunicable diseases, including diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke, and certain forms of cancer. Its health consequences range from increased risk of premature death to serious chronic conditions that reduce the overall quality of life.

10. If we’re going to cause an uproar over public education’s role in stagnant math and reading scores, shouldn’t we be equally as concerned about its role in fostering a disease that can impair proper brain development, cause psychological issues, and “reduce the overall quality of life?” (Yes, we should.)

11. From my purview as the former principal of K-8 school in Philadelphia, I know public schools can do more. Despite our best efforts, I saw many sugar-heavy breakfasts, unpalatable vegetables on cafeteria plates, full plates of food trashed in favor of chips, rushed lunch periods, incoherent health and nutrition education, and too little time, space, and too few resources for students to exercise.

12. I don’t believe we’ll end The Achievement Plateau with a narrow focus on reading and math, or with a fancy new set of standards and accompanying curriculum. I think we’ll do it when we start to reimagine schools as the foundation for building a healthy and civil society.

13. Over the next few weeks (bear with me as we uproot our life here in Philadelphia and start a new one in Boston), I’ll take a look at the history of food in schools, what we currently serve students, how other countries approach school lunch, nutrition education, and the way we teach health and physical education. I hope you’ll keep reading and sharing.

Thanks so much. Have a great week.

1. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. It’s a record we’ve held since 2002, and we show no signs of giving up the lead. Our great nation jails 639 of every 100,000 citizens, up from around 500 per 100,000 a decade ago.

2. That’s important context to remember when you read pieces like this one, from the Fordham Institute, on why “lax school discipline” is a terrible, awful, no good approach that’s creating unsafe schools and driving teachers out of the profession.

3. The author, Jeremy S. Adams, has taught civics in California for almost a quarter century. On the importance of teaching civics, we are aligned. While I think he makes some valid points about school discipline, he’s missing the bigger picture: our schools need not mirror a criminal justice system whose default is retributive justice — making offenders suffer in jail. Let me explain with some notable quotes from his piece.

4. Many teachers feel that they are being held hostage to an ideological experiment that harms them and their ability to teach, that harms innocent students who are trying to learn, and that in the end harms the very people it is meant to help by not holding them accountable for their actions.

   • This is probably accurate. But that’s often because we put the cart before the horse in education. We implemented new “Common Core Standards” by first launching high stakes tests without providing teachers training and resources. We’ve done the same with restorative justice. We changed the outcome measures — demanding a reduction in suspensions —without first changing practice at the school and classroom level with extensive training, development, and additional staff.

5. It is only in the peculiar world of modern education that teachers are told to purposefully turn a blind eye to behaviors and actions that would be unacceptable in any other setting.

   • Inaccurate. While I’m sure some administrators “turn a blind eye,” they are the exception. We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to poor behavior. When police decline to arrest violent offenders and school administrators allow students to repeatedly escape with just a verbal admonition, the message is that wrongdoings aren’t wrong — they’re tolerable. And that is, I believe, a bad message to send to the student body or population at large. And this isn’t the focus of restorative justice. Instead of punishing students, it aims to hold them accountable without suspending them.

6. Only in schools are we now told to “get curious, not furious” and where we recast “standing down” in the face of student misconduct not as a dereliction of duty on the part of teachers, not as tolerating the intolerable, but as acts of heroic compassion and sophisticated understanding.

   • Accurate. We should get “curious, not furious” at most transgressions. Making students suffer won’t fix their behavior. That approach simply does not produce the intended outcome of less crime. Consider that Philadelphia has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country — and its murder rate continues to rise. Incarceration/harsh retributive justice is a deterrent to some extent, but clearly not enough to create a civil society. Being curious about why students are behaving a certain way can lead to mental health support, special education services, and other “root-cause” treatments they deserve.

7. The breakdown of order, the absence of discipline, and the extinction of any concept of “tough love” is a brutal everyday reality for modern American educators.

   • Tough love is not extinct. I worked with many “tough love” teachers over the last six years, and they did it by building strong relationships with students, showing them they care about them as humans, and by holding high academic expectations. Not by indiscriminately berating them and kicking them out of class.

8. Certainly, within school, when abhorrent student behavior is tolerated, accommodated, and given endless indulgence, it proliferates.

   • Mostly accurate. Like I said, hen rules aren’t enforced, we encourage more misbehavior. This was certainly true at the school I led. Once students knew they’d be held accountable, we saw fewer egregious behaviors. Again, though, retributive justice isn’t the only means of accountability.

9. But our schools are not and cannot be cure-alls. They cannot make up for students’ unstable home lives, the drug addiction of parents, insufficient medical care, poor nutrition, poverty, or neighborhoods where violence and profanity are ubiquitous and trust is fleeting.

   • Accurate: they can’t be “cure-alls.” But they can be a part of the “drug cocktail” that builds a better society.

10. Adams also fails to acknowledge the systemic racial biases that retributive discipline perpetuates. Students of color are punished/suspended at higher rates that white students, even when they display similar levels of misbehavior. This disproportionality continues into our adult criminal justice system, where Black Americans receive longer sentences for similar crimes.

11. Suspensions have their place. Just like prisons do. Physical violence shouldn’t be tolerated in a civil society. But when we better meet the needs of our students and citizens, we create fewer reasons for poor behavior and crime. Still, it’s difficult for parents, teachers, and community members to imagine a world in which suspensions become more rare. Most of us grew up in a school culture that favored suspensions. But we can’t suspend our way to safer schools—students learn almost nothing while they’re sitting at home.

12. At my school, our suspension rate declined because utilized more restorative options, like conferences, community service, and community circles. But it also declined because the district and city government put behavioral health clinics in every school. At-risk students had behavioral health workers to support them, and many exhibited fewer and less extreme behaviors. We need more solutions like this that keep students in school.

13. The way forward is ensuring that we do “hold students accountable” for poor behavior without conflating accountability with harsh, retributive justice. If we start treating poor behavior as a symptom, build empathy in offenders through restorative justice, we can create safer, more inclusive schools — and perhaps a safer, more inclusive society.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week.

1. Today I’m experimenting with something new: a roundup of interesting education articles and some related thoughts. I’ve also got a brief life update as a bonus today. Hope you enjoy!

2. Banning sexualized content in school libraries? A suburban Philadelphia school district, Central Bucks, passed a resolution that, according to the article, “allows district parents to challenge books available in its libraries, paving the way for the removal and replacement of literature deemed by a committee as ‘age-inappropriate,’ and outlines that at every grade level, ‘no materials ... shall contain visual or visually implied depictions of sexual acts’ or “explicit written descriptions of sexual acts.”

3. Policies like this are unnecessary political theater. No one is proposing a porn section in school libraries, and students have access to more “depictions of sexual acts” on their smartphones than they ever will in a. The grand irony of book bans is that the students are demonstrating more maturity and understanding of history and sociology than those claiming they’re not mature enough to handle explicit content. Book banning is “age-inappropriate” for adults.

4. Armed teachers? This NYT article explores why more and more teachers are carrying guns at work. In Ohio, a new law requires just 24 hours of firearms training for educators to be armed. Ohio also requires 24 hours of training for learning to drive. Not sure how those are comparable, other than we should require all gun owners, like car owners, to get insurance.

5. It’s hard for me to imagine leading a school with armed staff. It was difficult enough training staff to use a new student information system or post a daily objective (which is often a tedious, theatrical requirement anyway).

6. From Politico: the origin of the religious right can be traced back to school segregation. (Thanks to Schooling in Socialist America for bringing this article to my attention in its most recent post).

7. College students who copy their homework benefit less from homework than those who work out the answers themselves. Shocker. This study also suggests the internet has turbo-charged homework copying. Does that mean homework will soon be obsolete?

8. Life update! Friday was my final day of work as a principal in the School District of Philadelphia. I played a lot of songs during morning admit and memorized a lot of students’ names, and feel most proud that I left the school better than I found it. Still, I’m sad to leave.

9. In a few weeks, I’ll start a three-year journey to earn my EdLD, or Doctor of Education Leadership, from Harvard. The EdLD is more of a doctorate for practitioners, preparing me for continuing my career in the field, whereas a PhD is more focused on preparing for a career in academia.

10. I’m not sure what’s on the other side of this journey: district leadership, policy, working in government — the possibilities are endless, and I’m open to letting the learning change me. And I’m excited.

11. In the meantime, I’ve got three weeks to focus on being a new dad. And pack. Packing is the worst, right?

12. I’m doing a lot of self-talk to remind myself that moving is an opportunity to declutter and live a simpler life. To be specific, our life will get about 66% more simple: we’re moving from our 2400 sq ft to an 837 sq ft apartment.

13. Regardless, I’ll have a computer. And time between classes. I plan on continuing to write, and I hope you’ll continue to read.

    Thanks, and have a great week.

1. On Friday, my wife and I welcomed our second son, Sam, into the world. To be sure, she did all the hard work. I just snipped the umbilical cord and fetched ice. Pennsylvania Hospital has great ice (and great staff).

2. Raising a newborn is hard work, especially when a woman is breastfeeding. My wife is feeding our son every 2-3 hours, meaning she’s getting very little sleep.

3. I’m also supporting with a few evening shifts, meaning I have extra time to read the articles about needing a solid 8 hours of sleep per night that get pushed through my newsfeed.

4. The extra hours awake also have me wondering, again, at how we might better support students before they show up for kindergarten. Specifically, how different outcomes for all students, and especially our most marginalized populations, would be if we provided new parents, especially those less financially secure, with adequate pay and childcare so they can focus on parenting their infants and toddlers.

5. There’s ample research on the importance of early childhood cognitive development. In particular, we know that toxic stress adversely impacts brain development. And how might infants experience toxic levels of stress? When their parents are toxically stressed about finances and childcare.

6. My wife’s work affords her just 8 weeks of time to fully focus on our son. Her maternity leave, which entitles her to 75% of her pay, will stop after that and she’ll be forced to return to work to keep earning. She can take four additional weeks of unpaid leave. Beyond that, she’d likely forfeit her job.

7. In the United Kingdom, parents get up to 39 weeks of maternity leave pay: 90% of one’s average weekly earnings (before tax) for the first 6 weeks, and about $190 or 90% of one’s average weekly earnings (whichever is lower) for the next 33 weeks.

8. Sweden, often revered as the golden child of education policy, offers parents 480 days — more than a year — which can be split evenly among them. Parents are paid at 80 percent of their normal pay during that time.

9. It’s well documented that the United States has some of the worst supports for new parents. McGill University studied 173 countries and found only 5 that don’t guarantee paid maternity leave for new mothers: Papau New Guinea, Lesotho, Liberia, Swaziland, and the United States.

10. Beyond just pay, many countries offer other critical benefits to new parents, like nurses that visit the home to care for new moms and monthly allowances for childcare, which is a massive burden for many US families.

11. Even in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world, the average cost of full-time childcare is $385 per week. That’s far less than what we’ll pay for childcare in Boston (yes, we’re moving to Boston in a few weeks — more on that soon!).

12. We’re fortunate to have the help of family, financial stability, and the little bit of maternity leave. Not everyone is so lucky. My job — in public education, ironically — doesn’t offer paternity benefits.

13. I think we can do much better in support of new parents. And while I’m certainly biased (and sleepless) right now, I think an investment in parents and early childcare might help our public education system produce even better results.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week. I’m gonna get some sleep.