Education Reads to Start Your Week, 5/26/26

Research as Marketing, Finding Trustworthy Research, Curriculum Fit Checks

Author

James Shanahan
May 26, 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!

Growing up in the Southern United States, I never put much thought into Memorial Day. School ended in early May so it wasn’t a holiday for kids. I don’t remember parades or cookouts or other celebrations. Nothing much happened in the town square on Memorial Day, even in my patriotic town during the post-9/11 surge of red white and blue. Those were saved for the 4th of July. I remember thinking how weird it was that car dealerships and department stores would have Memorial Day sales. Who cares about Memorial Day?

Having moved North, I was always surprised when someone asked me if I had plans for Memorial Day weekend. I usually didn’t even know it was coming up or that Memorial Day was always the last Monday in May — something I only put together about six or seven years ago. Later in life I learned that in the South many communities didn’t formally celebrate Memorial Day at all because it originated as Decoration Day, a holiday to commemorate Union soldiers killed in the Civil War. My ambivalence toward Memorial Day was not some fluke but a component of the South’s continued rebellion, it’s unreconstructed core that bleeds still and stains the fabric of American life.

I hope, therefore, that you took some time yesterday to memorialize and reflect. History is full of little contingent moments but so, too, are our daily lives and the work we do as educators, school leaders, parents, or policymakers. Small daily movements have a way of butterflying into cyclones years later. A day becomes a political contested moment. Likewise, kids should know why they had the day off because maybe, twenty-odd years later, they’ll have a better understanding of themselves as well as of their nation.

Research as Marketing

Dr. Bill Tozzo, math teacher and teacher educator, reminds us that we need to actually read the studies.

I am not writing this to argue that PLC at Work [the program evaluated in the study Tozzo discusses] is without value. The collaborative structures at its core may be genuinely useful under the right conditions. However, I cannot determine that from this study, and neither can anyone else. That is precisely the point.

I am writing this because this will happen to you. This study, or one engineered to the same end, will land on a conference room table in your building. Someone with authority will call it research. Someone with a budget will call it justified.

Most of the teachers in that room will not have read the study. Most of them will not know to ask who funded it, how the schools were selected, whether it was peer-reviewed, or what the effect sizes actually mean in practical terms.

Tozzo says teachers need to be ready to ask critical questions and they should read the studies driving school policies and curriculum.

You deserve to walk into that meeting armed. Start with the money: who funded the research, and who profits if the results are favorable? Then look at the sample — were the schools studied anything like yours, or were they hand-picked for success? Ask whether anyone independent ever reviewed the findings before they became a sales pitch. And ask what the effect sizes actually mean in a real classroom, not in a marketing email. Four questions. That is all it takes.

Those questions will not make you popular with vendors or consultants. They will, however, protect your students, your colleagues, and your school from committing time and resources to programs that remain unproven despite what the marketing claims.

The playbook works because most people never read the study. So read the study.

In a broad sense I agree with Tozzo but in my experience these kinds of changes don’t really play out the way he says. There’s no conference room. Teachers aren’t given space to comment or question. Decisions about, to use his example, Professional Learning Communities, are imposed on teachers who are usually hearing about the new initiative for the first time when they’re being trained on the initiative, and long after the decision was made. Being a critical consumer of research is great and I do wish more teachers read “the research” but let’s not act like asking Tozzo’s four questions at the pre-planning PD session where a PLC at Work staff developer is training you on the protocol will change anything.

Instead, I want you to take away two things from Tozzo’s post. First, “research” is often just marketing. It’s either entirely proprietary and therefore not transparent at all, or it’s flawed in some way (Tozzo’s post points out selection effects and effect size problems in this one study) but the marketers know nobody who makes decisions cares to read the studies. And that’s the second point. Marketers understand that districts are often legally required to implement curriculum and practices that are “evidence based” but that laws don’t usually specify what counts as evidence. They produce weak and proprietary research in order to satisfy these requirements knowing full well that decision makers don’t read studies and people who might critique the studies don’t make the decisions.

Research-as-marketing is how we got iReady and IXL and KhanAcademy into so many classrooms despite shoddy evidence. It’s how Lucy Calkins Units of Study got so big. It’s why we’ve pressed ahead with SoR aligned practices without checking if there’s actually evidence to back some of them up, like oral-only phonemic awareness training. The people making these decisions are not, in general, doing careful policy evaluations or diving deep into the research. We can demand teachers “read the study” all we want but the system is bigger than that.

Finding Trustworthy Research

Natalie Wexler looks at two resources that could help teachers find quality research to support their classroom practice. I also think Wexler knows teachers have little impact on policy and often writes for a more mainstream and policy-adjacent audience. Anyway, here are the resources:

The new tool, called The Evidence Checker, was devised by two science-of-learning researchers at the University of Toronto, Nidhi Sachdeva and Jim Hewitt, who publish an excellent Substack newsletter called, appropriately, The Science of Learning. Their goal is to communicate research findings in accessible prose and connect them to practical recommendations for classroom practice.

I haven’t evaluated the tool and I’m lukewarm about AI as a product but this is clearly an honest effort and free. I also have my worries about the Science of Learning running into the same trap that has stymied other similar movements in the recent past. I think a tool like this could help prevent some of the weaker and more problematic versions of SoL from taking hold. That said, be aware that the only evidence that will be included here is evidence about SoL practices. The same goes for the next resource. While I agree that there’s a lot of value here, I am not sure the kinds of studies that show SoL efficacy are the only ones we should care about.

Her other resource:

Which brings me to the other resource that could improve teachers’ effectiveness: a new edition of The Science of Learning, a document developed by a group called Deans for Impact. Like the original, which came out in 2015, the new version is designed to summarize key findings of cognitive science research and translate them into practical guidance.4

Deans for Impact aims to bring teacher prep programs more in line with cognitive science, so—while experienced teachers would no doubt find it useful, if they’re open to changing longstanding practices—it’s primarily aimed at teacher educators and prospective or new teachers.

The Science of Learning incorporates research that has emerged over the last decade and covers six general questions, such as “How do students understand new ideas?” and “How do students solve problems and transfer learning to new contexts?” Under each of these questions, the document summarizes several related “Principles,” alongside “Practical implications for the classroom,” and—a new feature—“Pitfalls to be wary of.”

A final section lists “common misconceptions,” such as this widespread one: “Memorization is just rote regurgitation that does not support learning and deeper conceptual understanding.” In fact, the document explains, when students have more knowledge stored in long-term memory, they have more capacity for complex thinking.

Again, I haven’t personally vetted either of these resources so don’t take this as my endorsement but at this point I have an overall positive feeling from Wexler’s description but urge everyone not to see SoL as a panacea.

Here’s a bit of her excellent qualification at the end of the post.

One reason is that, even with the practical guidance the resources provide, it can be challenging for teachers to figure out how to apply scientific principles to the specifics of whatever they’re teaching—especially if they’re given instructional materials or directives from administrators that conflict with cognitive science. The problem may be most intractable in the area of reading comprehension, where assumptions and practices that contradict the evidence—including standardized reading comprehension tests—are deeply entrenched.

Plus, no individual teacher has the ability to ensure that students get a coherent learning experience, where instruction at each grade level builds on knowledge and skills that have been previously taught. To make real progress, we need whole-school, or better yet, whole-district or even whole-state initiatives.

Those initiatives should include adopting detailed, coherent curricula that are themselves grounded in evidence from cognitive science. Ideally, these curricula will provide guidance in both what to teach and how to deliver instruction in a way that can enable all students to succeed. There are curricula that do that, but in the current landscape it can be challenging for decision-makers to identify them.

I wish more commentators would take this position.

Curriculum Fit Checks

Las week I linked part one of Rachel Gabriel’s Curriculum Buyer’s Remorse post. She’s back with part two and, I think, it offers use another way through the mess described above. She uses the “fit check” as a metaphor for schools adopting a curriculum. We look at ourselves in the mirror when trying on a new outfit to see if the designers and sewers and manufacturers produced garments that meet our sartorial needs. Nobody says you should accept wearing clothes that are unflattering or don’t fit (even protective gear that must be worn has to fit well or it may not offer effective protection). Yet, because we’ve built a system where expertise and knowledge are increasingly located outside of the classroom and where teachers are not authorities but, instead, are subject to authority, everyone insists schools must wear curriculum as it comes. There is no fit check. Gabriel here urges schools to do it anyway because they have to do it anyway.

Maybe the program that is 90 minutes off the shelf needs to fit in 75 minutes. A 60 minute program covers everything except for writing, which has to be found elsewhere. A basal program comes with so many optional components you could teach it all day and still not get to everything. You have to decide what to mix and what to match.

I wrote something similar last year. My point was that teachers are, by the nature of the job, making curriculum decisions in their classrooms and we shouldn’t pretend that distant experts can design the exact perfect thing for every kid in every class. In fact, the more we do, the more we have to expect failure. Gabriel wants to give schools license to be creative with combining their context with the expert-designed curriculum. Her example of the different lesson lengths is a good one! Even within a single district, some schools might be on a block schedule and some on a daily schedule. Some may have a 55 minute long class and others may be 90 minutes. We can demand all schools have the same class lengths or we can adapt a curriculum to different class lengths. What’s more, she wants schools to iterate and recognizes that pressure for fidelity is counterproductive.

So, we tailor again. And check again. And then we try it again and watch. Are we seeing the values in real time:

  1. Are students reading, writing and talking about text for as many minutes as possible in every period?

  2. Are students learning how to read, write, and talk about text in ways they didn’t know when they walked in?

  3. Do students that need skill work have more teacher-directed skill work, and students focused on integration and meaning-making have ample time to practice that with peers?

  4. Do teachers have ways to see what they know and can do, and room to adjust in response?

We are still asking ourselves whether this program allows us to be who we want to be. Unfortunately, this is also where people often veer off course. Once we try it out, the walkthroughs begin looking for fidelity, which is too often defined as “are you doing whatever someone thinks the program says you should be doing?”.

It’s ironic, too, that people who accuse schools of being unable to innovate will then turn around and promote strict adherence to some kind of curriculum. If we want innovative schools, we have to give them the space to do so.

This is, I think, one reason teachers become cynical and don’t consume research or search out best practices. Whenever they do, it’s snuffed out from the top. Schools don’t get to do a fit check. They are asked to wear the outfit just because the marketing email said it would fit.

Thanks for reading!