Scholastic Alchemy
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A Year of Scholastic Alchemy

A Year of Scholastic Alchemy

Looking back and learning

James Shanahan
January 02, 2026

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing and Fridays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

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Lesson One: Scholastic Alchemy

It should come as no surprise that the name of the blog/newsletter/thing that I write every week is also its core lesson. While I don’t often talk about complexity theory, and certainly don’t have the mathematical background that actual complexity theorists deploy to, you know, theorize, I think the lesson of Scholastic Alchemy is ultimately related to complexity theory, especially theorizing around complex systems. In complex systems, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Put another way, even if we know how every part of the system functions, the system itself is the product of the parts and the relationships between those parts. This introduces lots of variability to systems and means that having a clear understanding of one or a few parts doesn’t tell you enough to understand the whole system. The reason I use alchemy as a metaphor is because, at least in the world of education, not only do we have a weak grasp of how the complex system works, but we also misapprehend crucial parts.

I began the year with a post about phones in schools for two reasons. First, there was a lot of media discussion of phones in schools and some of the commentary online and from parents in other venues was one of shock that schools had ever sought to incorporate pones in the first place. Second, was that the theory of why phones would be helpful was, I think, the perfect example of misapprehending a part of the complex system of schooling. The talking about the phones led naturally to talking about human capital theory and expectations based on a faulty read of economics. We were told by damned near everyone that the thing schools should be doing was getting kids to use more and more technology, including smartphones. This was a reasonable approach because schools were thought to create the labor force and therefore the economy of tomorrow. If we trained more kids to code, then there would be more coding jobs for them. This translated into an anything goes approach toward tech in the classroom. Not only was it not crazy, it was common sense right up until it wasn’t. That’s scholastic alchemy in a nutshell and we see this phenomenon play out again and again in education. We’re seeing it right now with AI products, AI companions, AI curriculum, AI instruction, and even AI psychological counseling in schools. We believe this is necessary because kids need AI literacy and familiarity with AI since AI is the future of work. Will it play out the same way? Who knows? If I had to make a prediction, I’d say that schools will continue to adopt anything and everything labeled as AI for the foreseeable future and despite the growing criticism of technology in the classroom. It’s scholastic alchemy, folks!

Lesson Two: Politics are politicking again

After phones, I spent a few posts looking at one explanation for a ~30 year school reform movement that focused on things like school choice, accountability, testing, and standards. Drawing on the work of political scientist, David Menefee-Libey, I explained the existence of an informal treaty between the left and right in the US with regard to school reform. (I’m using left and right very broadly here and could also say conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans.) The basic structure of the treaty held that the left would weaken support of teachers unions and stop pursuing school integration while the right would stop pressing for religious schooling and agree to fund public education. The left gained trust and status around running public schools and, critically, conservatives helped pass funding for schools. Conservatives received accountability frameworks and expansion of school choice programs via charter schools. Because of the critical role charter schools played in both sides accepting this “treaty” Menefee-Libey even calls it the charter school treaty. From the late 1980s to the 2010s, this treaty limited reforms to things like test-based accountability, setting state-national educational standards, expanding charter schools and operationalizing school choice. If vouchers were implemented, they were often very limited in who could access them. Overall, large scale structural reforms of schools, such as who pays, what gets paid for, and the overall purposes of public schooling were off limits.

Adherence to the treaty looked different depending on whether you were taking a right or left perspective but, in the end, the right felt like a combination of Common Core and Obama’s Race to the Top legislation constituted too radical a set of reforms. Moreover, they worried that the federal government under Obama was planning to renew strong civil rights and integration enforcement. They felt the left had violated the treaty. Under the first Trump administration, the treaty was abandoned by conservatives who sought to weaken public schools and promote paying for private religious options. Along the way, they officially ended any federal requirements related to standardized tests and accountability. The left, meanwhile, didn’t see the Obama-era reforms as being too radical and felt it was the conservatives who broke the treaty without cause.

The state of play today is interesting but also frustrating because the two sides are operating with completely different understandings of schooling and what school is for. I’ve complained about this repeatedly all year but it bears repeating. The liberal and left factions of our politics, education systems, and media are busy fighting the last war. They seem to believe that if they find the right mix of school accountability, testing, and high standards for students then we’re going to get back to a reformed NCLB/RTTT status quo. Conservatives are quite clear that they want none of it. Since conservatives currently hold power and are implementing their preferred policies, it’s worth paying attention to them! Over and over, we hear that testing, academic outcomes, and successful public schools are less important to the conservative movement than promoting conservative values in children. Their big policy reform is also quite radical in that they’re sending public money to religious (Chistian) schools and homeschooling in the hopes of instilling these conservative values. They do not mind that these policies are stripping cash from public schools because they’re convinced that public schools are not worth saving. They also seem implicitly willing to accept a certain amount of graft and fraud in the mix. Liberals don’t seem to understand that this shift has happened.

Lesson Three: The “return” of standardization

As I noted in the intro, one thing I’ve learned this year is that standardization has changed. I never thought standardization was gone because I’ve worked in and around schools since the NCLB era. Despite changes in official policy, especially at the federal level, there’s still a lot of school accountability and a lot of standardized testing. What I’ve come to realize this year is that standardization and accountability have quietly transformed from punishing teachers for bad test scores into a system of observation and control. The way standardization works now is through curriculum and instruction. Teachers deliver a single standard curriculum designed by “experts” to meet state skill-based standards. They’re not just blabbing out content, though. Teachers are expected to read scripts and are held accountable even for their word choice and tone of voice. Teachers are sounding alarm bells about how dehumanizing and uninspiring this is. I’m worried that this kind of standardization also transmutes important learning theories into the educational equivalent of lead. We end up with a weird dilemma where commentators make improving education a question of curriculum entirely. From this perspective, doing better means lawmakers need to mandate the right curriculum and then teachers simply implement it with fidelity. Or else.

There’s also a media criticism component here because again and again we’re told that accountability is over, that it ended with Obama or with teachers’ unions or with flaky progressive parents who hate testing. The actual record is quite different, but nobody today seems interested in digging into the recent past. If they did, they’d see that changes to accountability regimes required the decisive support of the most conservative factions of society and in the federal government. For all their liberal bluster, the often referenced opt-out movement in New York wasn’t centered in diehard blue enclaves like NYC but in the conservative suburbs of Long Island and rural upstate New York. Conservatives wanted to weaken the testing regime when they were negotiating with Obama for Race to the Top while liberals fought to keep it. As much as I love the focus education is receiving in liberal outlets like The Argument, there is far too much focus on blaming the left-progressives for all of our educational woes and far too little focus on accurately reporting the history and politics of what’s happening.

A case in point comes from people lamenting that schools don’t read whole books anymore. This manifests in blaming Democrats, teachers unions, and liberals more broadly but it’s all downstream from an incentive system established by standardization and test-based accountability. When the test looks for a discrete skill based on a standard, then the schools will teach that discrete skill and that standard. As Lesson Two above reminds us, both sides of our political system came together to agree that standards and accountability were the biggest reforms permissible and we reorganized the academic side of our schools to teach to the test (and minimized non-academic functions). Why are we shocked that this happened? Why are we shocked that it’s continuing to happen right down to controlling teachers very movement and voice? We don’t read whole books because our system of standards and accountability are hostile to reading whole books. Somehow, though, more standardization seems to be the only answer given.

Lesson Four: Comprehensive schools needs to come back

As the year went on, I realized I needed to articulate a positive vision, not just focus on the negative aspects of our education system. There are many many things that I think could and should change for the better but I decided to argue for something that would, I think, have public appeal: comprehensive schooling. My argument is simple: parents are dissatisfied with public schools because they feel like they don’t have much of a say in their child’s education. All the decisions are made as far from local schools as possible, and that includes limiting the choices available at local public schools. This is not a new trend and has been expanding slowly since the 1980s: smaller schools, specialized academic programs, fewer electives or sports, more choice between specialized schools rather than within comprehensive ones. What I suspect is that people would prefer to house multiple specialized programs under one big roof. Kids shouldn’t have to fill out applications and enroll in lotteries if they want specialized STEM courses. They shouldn’t have to quit the baseball team and change schools to also get some experience in automotive repair. We need to bring back comprehensive high schools that strive to offer as many different kinds of options to every kid that wants them. Concomitant with that, we should lower the stakes of schooling so kids can fail classes, change academic tracks, or experiment with multiple tracks without somehow ruining their trajectory toward college and career.

I think this kind of setup would make parents a lot happier than voucher-based choice systems that increase the burden on parents to make the right choice with imperfect information, make them fight private school application systems, and make them monitor their educational choices because there is no external accountability with the ESA-style vouchers. The challenge is that it requires us to adequately staff and fund public schools, make investments in infrastructure and tolerate specialized classes with low enrollment. A comprehensive model would offer, say, BC calculus even if only four or five kids were going to take it. Moreover, it is hard to build test-based accountability systems for subjects outside of math and English-Language Arts. It’s not like nobody ever made a standardized test for social studies or science but they’re way noisier and depend too much on math/ELA. Besides, what does a standardized test in theater or woodshop look like? How about HVAC maintenance or computer science? At some point, standardized testing is impractical and we want kids to demonstrate learning instead. That makes the accountability folks super uncomfortable because it means trusting teachers and schools to make subjective judgements. Those subjectivities are, however, what make parents like schools. They want to feel like their kids are seen and like assessments are giving meaningful feedback.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t meant to be an argument against accountability overall, as recent revelations about poorly prepared college students should have reminded us. Instead, we need hybrid systems that combine testing, professional development for staff and teachers, curriculum reforms, and intensive interventions for kids who need it. Well-resourced comprehensive schools are better positioned to provide this kind of support as opposed to smaller fragmented or choice-based systems. When we hear about the “Mississippi Miracle” one part that’s often left out is that Mississippi’s voters and legislators have rejected large-scale school choice reforms and school vouchers. They’ve stayed closer to a comprehensive model than reformers want to admit.

Lesson Five: Incomplete information

Speaking of the Mississippi Miracle, another lesson I’ve learned this year is just how incomplete our information about education is. Despite some initial misgivings, I’m actually convinced something real is happening in Mississippi and that the slow steady gains they’re seeing are real. But, once coverage of those gains reaches the media or even worse, social media, all of Mississippi’s reforms are reduced to using phonics curricula in elementary school and 3rd grade retention. Not only do these perspectives leave out Mississippi’s state-wide professional development and coaching program but they ignore the “leaky bucket” nature of Mississippi’s retention program. Between 20-25% of Mississippi’s 3rd graders fail the state mandated test that promotes kids out of third grade but less than 10% of students are retained because the state uses good faith waivers and an easier test during re-takes. I have not seen this reported on anywhere despite it being clearly laid out in Mississippi’s laws and in their annual testing data. The retention program, it turns out, is less about retaining students and more of a filtering mechanism to target the 8-9% of students who could plausibly benefit from a year of intensive phonics and literacy instruction while passing forward the remainder of kids who failed. These omissions are important as more states seek to replicate Mississippi’s success. The public hears retention but that’s not a good encapsulation of the policy.

The information environment in the media may be poor but official data is also getting harder to come by. At the federal level, the Trump administration is doing everything in their power to eliminate data collected and reported by the Department of Education and even “the nation’s report card,” the NAEP tests legally required by congress, are suffering form staffing and funding cuts. Other sources of data, such as grants for various large scale longitudinal studies have also been eliminated. We simply won’t know as much about how schools are respecting students’ civil rights or supporting students with disabilities. At the same time, the federal Department of Education, far from being shuttered, is monitoring schools for their adherence to conservative values and ideology.

I’d like to say that states are jumping in to fill that gap but things are uneven across the board. To start with, state standardized exams are, I argue, often low-quality and lacking in both reliability and validity. Not only that, but states frequently make significant changes to their exams creating a situation whereby old scores simply can’t be compared with new ones. Realistically, only 27 states have consistent enough testing to compare with their pre-pandemic scores. Some very large states like New York, Texas, Florida, and Illinois have changed their state tests in the last five years so we legitimately can’t know from those tests how students today compare with students in 2019. (This is one reason the NAEP is important.) But, beyond that, many states are moving forward with broadly accessible voucher schemes that will spend public tax money on private and home schooling without any accountability or testing requirements. For example, when researchers tried to look at students outcomes from microschools, they gave up because there is simply no data available. From reporting in several outlets, though, there’s already good reason to suspect microschools are being set up and run as scams or to provide cover for unscrupulous labor practices. Taxpayer dollars are flowing to private schools, microschools, and homeschooling but there seems to be zero interest in determining whether the public’s investment in these children is being care for. Are the learning? Are they achieving? Will they have the knowledge and skills to be productive members of society? Apparently in this brave new world, that’s simply not a problem the state cares about anymore even though it’s your tax dollars paying for it. It’s a bad information environment no matter how we slice it and our system of education is flying blind. As a society we are making decisions based on theory and ideology instead of research and data.

2026 is going to be… a year

I don’t have big predictions to make. Not really. There’s so many variables, so many pieces of a complex machine interacting in uncertain ways that I think any prediction would be mere speculation. What I do know is that we’re probably just a prone now to making mistakes as we have been since I started teaching and writing about education in the NCLB era. Radical changes are underway in our education system, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1970s when liberal judges and lawmakers (finally) began enforcing school integration laws that had been on the books for years. We may tell ourselves that accountability is done and standardization is over, but nothing could be further from the truth. Instead it has morphed into extreme micromanagement of teachers and an absolute flattening of curriculum into pre-packaged highly processed units. Meanwhile it’s hard to get a complete picture of the impacts of various policies being promoted right now. Often many of the biggest advocates for voucher-based school choice are also the first to eschew gathering data on efficacy and outcomes. States are busy rewriting tests and redesigning standards so it will be several more years before we have longitudinally comparable data and the federal side of things is downright ugly. What I hope people begin to recognize is that parents and communities want comprehensive schools that offer a wide variety of courses, extracurricular activities, and graduation pathways. The more we shift the burden of education onto parents, the more work we’re requiring of them. I think parents are already exhausted by systems of choice and often blindsided by asymmetrical information. Let’s bring back the kinds of schools they make movies about.

Happy New Year!

-James