Education Reads to Start Your Week, June 6th

One thing I’ve learned is that Direct Instruction (DI) is not the same thing as direct instruction (di). DI refers to a very scripted curriculum whereas di is a set of pedagogical principles that can be applied to any curriculum or content. Right off the bat, we can see how jingle-jangle fallacies are allowed to exist.

We were all using the same term–direct instruction–but we were definitely not all speaking the same language. I want to say that this is not in any way a critique of any of these responses. I shared my own jangle fallacy first to illustrate that I understood where these people were in their learning. I was in their same exact position just three years earlier. But if education in general wants to escape our current jingle fallacy, then we need to know the research.

Perhaps it’s time we recognize that teacher-led or student-centered instruction is a false dichotomy. Teacher-led instruction is inherently student-centered because what the teacher does is based on what the students demonstrate. It’s putting students’ knowledge at the center and making a determination of what to do next. If students are demonstrating that they don’t yet understand, teachers can provide more examples and explicit instruction. This represents teachers realizing that students are still in the acquisition stage and responding appropriately. If students demonstrate that they understand, teachers can start to fade support until students need it again, using the “I do, we do, you do” as a sliding scale instead of a strict lesson progression. This represents teachers using real-time data to determine where students are in the hierarchy and delivering instruction accordingly. Calling this style of teaching anything other than student-centered demonstrates a lack of understanding of what direct instruction is.

At Alpha School, developers have pioneered an AI proctoring platform that is able to create the kinds of constraints that lead to learning at scale. The system monitors not just for prohibited behaviours such as using chatbots, but for also for distraction and patterns of cognitive engagement such as time on task, latency and tracking whether students are actually thinking through problems or bypassing that effort. It’s an attempt to restore, through algorithmic observation, the accountability structure that classroom presence naturally provides. Seeing it in action last year changed my mind. I had assumed that effective learning at scale required a traditional classroom; Alpha's system suggests a credible alternative.

In the four years since a gunman killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, school districts in Texas have spent billions of dollars to put police officers on every school campus in the state. This outlay is meant to protect students from similar attacks. And our reporters spoke with dozens of parents, teachers, principals and students who said they believed in it. School police officers stop violent fights. They confiscate weapons. And they’re a balm against a parent’s greatest fear: school shootings.

“Just look at the TV,” a third-grade math teacher in Dallas told The Times. “There’s no school in America that should not have some kind of officer.”

But the flood of Texas school police officers — about 11,000 have been trained, more than the total number of police officers in many states — has not always made public schools safer.

Officers have instead turned to heavy-handed tactics o

Today, Texas is home to nearly 400 school district police departments, more than all other states combined. Most of the remaining districts have contracts with outside police agencies. The number of officers trained to work in schools — about 11,000 — exceeds the total number of police officers in at least two dozen states.

In interviews, dozens of parents, teachers, principals and students said that they believed police officers were needed to keep schools safe. Many praised officers for stopping violent fights. Almost everyone cited fear of school shootings. As recently as March, a student at a high school in the San Antonio area shot a teacher and then killed himself. School officers have confiscated dozens of guns in that region alone, and some have thwarted potential attacks.

Across the state, officers directed obscenities, insults and threats at students just before or after using physical force, records and video footage show.

“Stop crying like a little girl,” a school police officer in San Antonio ordered a seventh-grade boy who had gotten in trouble for being disruptive.

“Boy, I will hurt you,” an officer in Houston told a high school student who talked back to him.

“Get your fucking hands up before I shoot you!” an officer in Galveston shouted while pointing her gun at a 17-year-old she had cornered in a yard. The teen had run off campus after he was caught with a vape.

Most officers employed by a Texas school district previously worked for municipal police agencies, an analysis of police certification data found. More than 1,000 worked as jailers.

In those roles, officers are encouraged to have a commanding presence in order to take control of dangerous situations.

“The notion of policing requires force,” said Aaron Kupchik, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware, who writes about school policing. “It requires that you compel people to obey your authority.”

But dealing with young people, he and other law enforcement experts said, calls for a different approach. Research shows that adolescents, whose brains have not yet fully developed, often have difficulty with impulse control. Yelling at or physically dominating them, the experts added, can backfire.

Washington students in both public and charter schools gained roughly two-thirds of a grade level in math and about a third of a grade level in reading over that period, according to the analysis. A grade level represents roughly a year’s worth of learning, which means that eighth graders in 2025 were about six months ahead in math compared with eighth graders in 2022.

But the gains should not obscure a grimmer reality.

In 2025, only 26 percent of Washington students met grade-level standards in math and only 38 percent were proficient in reading, according to a separate report from the D.C. Policy Center, an independent local think tank. Just 16 percent of high school juniors and seniors were considered to be college or career ready.

This was always part of the debate over tying teacher evaluation to student scores. Focus on growth, and teachers of honors classes are in trouble, because a student who’s already at the 98th percentile isn’t going to grow at all. Focus on proficiency scores, and the teachers who are assigned the low-achieving students are in trouble, because no matter how well they teach those students, they will still lag (no, Virginia, there is no magical technique for “catching up” students quickly-- if there was, teachers would use it all the time).

Worse, when policy bases teacher or school evaluation on proficiency, it turns the lowest achievers into hot potatoes. We’ve seen this in action where charter and voucher schools work hard to avoid those low-scoring students who would mess up their numbers. When Steven Wilson is cited in the article pointing to charter schools with low-income students and high levels of proficiency, he’s simply pointing to the effects of creaming, where schools do their best to avoid having their numbers damaged by low-scoring students. There is no magic trick there that can be applied “at scale” for the public system.

Ultimately, schools can not win playing the growth measurement game because schools cannot raise student scores every year forever, as if somehow each cohort of students was smarter than their older siblings. Test scores are not a stock market ticker.

But schools also cannot win the proficiency game. BS Test scores and “grade levels” are scaled and normed (curved). If the BS Test were truly standards based, students taking the test could be scored instantly after they clicked the last answer. But the scores have to be computed and compared and scaled and then some state bureau sets the cut scores. But curves have to have a bottom. If, after years of intensive effort, every child tested above grade level for reading, we would not conclude that a reading education moonshot had occurred-- we would conclude that “grade level” had been set too low. If every child was rated “proficient,” we would conclude that the requirements for “proficient” had been made too easy (just check every piece complaining about grade inflation).