Education Reads to Start Your Week, March 16th

Wanting the Impossible?, Instructional Illusions, EdTech and the Revolt of the Public

Author

James Shanahan
March 16, 2026

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Mondays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each and Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing. 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!

Wanting the Impossible?

Freddie DeBoer argues that what people want from schools has never been accomplished anywhere, ever. While I think he makes a good point, I find myself asking which people he’s talking about. Who are these people who are so wholly committed to a blank slate view of students, such that every single student is supposedly capable of the highest levels of educational achievement and will enter a highly remunerative career? It’s worth looking at how Freddie answers that question and seeing what, maybe, could be added.

DeBoer is sometimes labeled an educational pessimist because he often argues that many, even most students will not reach high levels of academic achievement. Having read his work over the years, I’m not sure that pessimism is the right label. Rather, DeBoer is a bit of a realist in his diagnosis of the problem, and this essay is a good example of where he’s coming from.

The specific framing of schools as instruments of racial and socioeconomic equity is almost entirely a product of the post-Brown, post-Great Society period and thus roughly 60 to 70 years old, a blink in the history of formal education. The Civil Rights Movement, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the subsequent decades of desegregation litigation, A Nation at Risk, and the eventual codification of this logic in No Child Left Behind in 2002 and its successors created a framework in which closing demographic achievement gaps became the central metric by which schools were judged. This goal is of course among the most noble in all of human culture. The trouble is that, as I and others have argued, education can’t close that gaps. Seeing schooling as a tool of equality was a genuine revolution in how Americans thought about the purpose of education, but it was layered on top of institutions that were never built for that purpose, staffed by professionals not trained for it, and asked to compensate for inequalities generated by housing policy, labor markets, healthcare access, and generational wealth gaps that schools have no power to touch.

In the past, Deboer says, schools were asked to sort and segregate, perhaps by ability or race or gender or social class or IQ but segregate and sort they did. While this had many problems, it did at least understand humans as flawed, varied, and idiosyncratic creatures. With all our different proclivities and capacities, it would have seemed absurd to earlier generations to suggest that every single child was the same, could achieve the same, and that schools alone were the mechanism for achieving that sameness. For the largely agrarian America of the last 19th and early 20th century this was an effective system. Most kids were going to be doing manual labor on farms so basic literacy and numeracy were enough. Even as the economy industrialized, most people didn’t need educations beyond high school in order to have careers and support families.

DeBoer places the blame for today’s blank-slate attitudes in education squarely on neoliberalism and the decline of industrial labor employment in the US. Without a large pool of good jobs available to kids who weren’t college-bound, the policy environment needed to change what schools were for.

So pushing everybody into the college pipeline became the thing to do, and the next thing you know it’s a bipartisan consensus and both Democrats and Republicans are clamoring for it, and suddenly we’ve got a perceived educational crisis on our hands - never mind that our schooling problems don’t start in school and college education can’t actually sustain an entire labor force in an advanced economy.

Now, there’s more to DeBoer’s article but I want to shift here to my own writing about this way of interpreting education policy’s recent-ish history. Namely, I want to remind everyone that human capital theory has been misapplied, inverted really, to justify the kind of education policies that DeBoer thinks are doomed to failure. It was my second post here at Scholastic Alchemy that covered this territory. Human capital theory suggests that people go to school and get an education in order to gain knowledge and skills that they (rightly) believe will increase their future earnings and quality of life. But, filtered down through education policies and various political maneuvers, something changes. Here’s what I wrote in the next post.

Until now, I’ve been using human capital to tell one version of a story about the relationship between education, labor productivity, and the job market. Schools and universities impart general skills (perhaps literacy, numeracy, knowledge of important scientific principles and practices, an understanding of relevant history and civics, time management, and self control, among some other things?) that enable people to be successful when they join the workforce and give them the ability to benefit from specific skills training in the workplace, sometimes repeatedly. This results in a generally better set of circumstances as measured by their income and by labor productivity, which in turn makes the economy better, growing the GDP pie for all.

What if we kind of inverted this story and then turned it inside out? What if, instead of schooling leading to generally a capable workforce, schooling was partially creating the job market and, therefore, driving the economy itself and the economic wellbeing of the populace? When I put it this way maybe it’s a bit crazy sounding, but I’d argue that this is what many important people who make decisions about education policy actually believed.

I think what happened is that policymakers really started to believe that if we trained a specific kind of workforce, then those jobs would appear just by dint of there being people capable of doing the work. Accordingly, it was schools that were supposed to meet this need. It’s not just K-12, either, Our university system has also trended toward satisfying employers needs rather than other missions that universities might pursue. As I mentioned last week, Chad Orzel has some interesting thoughts along these lines in order to help solve employers’ information problems when hiring new employees. One of the problems Orzel identified was that employers seemed to be pressing for more specific or specialized degrees when, perhaps, larger broader degrees linked by common methodologies might be better.

I think one other thread that compliments what I’ve written and what DeBoer has said here is to note that there is a bipartisan consensus behind financially penalizing college degree programs where graduates don’t earn much money. That’s a whole other post, though.

Ed Tech and the Revolt of the Public

The pressure for schools to produce “21st century learners” who are fluent in the latest technology is downstream from the confused inversion of human capital theory I referenced above. Three recent pieces caught my attention this week along those lines. First, writing in Education Next, Meredith Coffey takes stock of what Education Technology has accomplished. She includes a recent history of our relatively rapid adoption of tech in the classroom as well as some of the justifications for bringing tech into schools in the first place. They should sound familiar.

The rationales for at-school screen time varied: Digital programs will boost student achievement. Tech can better differentiate the curriculum for diverse learners. Devices enhance student engagement. Schools must teach 21st Century Skills. Students must become adept at computer use so they can perform well on newly computerized state assessments (otherwise, they’re “screwed,” one parent told me).

Yet, all this technology hasn’t done much for measures of student learning. I want to highlight another section, though, where Coffey notes that families trying to navigate assignments, learning management systems, screen time, and other complexities are feeling overwhelmed. For example, when a kid turns in an assignment by hand, that places responsibility on the student. When a kid hands in an assignment on a learning management system, it has a way of becoming a problem for the parents.

Alexandra explains: “Canvas runs my life. I have Canvas Parent, and I have Canvas Student. . . . It still fills me with trepidation because some teachers will have all their assignments in there, but the times that they’re due are all different.” Whereas students in the past submitted hard-copy assignments at the start of a class period, now assignments might be due electronically at the start of class or at the start of the school day, noon, 11:59 p.m. Friday, 11:59 p.m. Sunday, or a countless number of other times. When her second child entered middle school, Alexandra hoped that she would be better equipped to support her, but instead it became more burdensome to keep track of the expectations and systems of the 14 different teachers assigning work to her 6th and 8th graders.

We’re placing burdens on families without even realizing it simply by using edtech. No wonder parents are pushing back on screens in school. Which is, where the second article comes in. Jackie Mader at the Hechinger Report checks in with efforts by parents to limit the amount of screen time for kids in elementary grades. We open with a story of what should have been predictable misuse of tech by young kids who had no business using it.

A few months before her daughter started kindergarten, Claire Benoist saw a Facebook post that stunned her. Another family with an incoming kindergartner was wondering if it was true that children in the Croton-Harmon School District, 45 miles north of New York City, receive an iPad when they start school.

Other parents confirmed this: Kindergartners are often on their own iPads during school, playing games and watching television shows and YouTube videos. “It had never occurred to me that screens would be used in such a way,” Benoist said.

A few weeks before school started, Benoist told school administrators in the 1,500-student district that she couldn’t believe schools would give devices to kids as young as 4 and 5. Benoist and her husband had followed pediatric guidelines recommending no screen time before age 2. After that, they only allowed occasional episodes of kids’ shows like “Bluey” or “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.”

School administrators assured Benoist that iPad time would be limited to 15 minutes a day, she said. But once school started, Benoist’s daughter suddenly knew jingles from diaper and car commercials, which Benoist and her husband determined were playing before YouTube videos at school.

It’s not wonder, then, that we get the subtitle of the third edtech article from Jennifer Berkshire: Backlash against edtech and a curious case of amnesia. Like both articles above, Berkshire notes that many parents have had enough of edtech and are pressuring schools to scale back on its use. What I enjoyed about her post, though, is the reminder about who was pushing for such rampant adoption of classroom technology. The education reform movement was also an edtech adoption movement.

I’d locate the zenith of the reformer/tech love affair in 2017 when New Schools Venture Fund, a reform org that funds all of the other orgs, laid down a challenge, or rather, a big bet. At its annual summit, backed by a who’s who of fond of tech funders—Gates, Zuckerberg, Walton—NSVF called for big philanthropy to bet big on tech-based personalized learning. “The world has changed dramatically … and our schools have struggled to keep up,” then CEO Stacey Childress warned the crowd. But not all the news was bad. Going all in on education innovation would also pay off handsomely, claimed NSVF, producing an estimated 200 to 500 percent return on investment. And lest parents, teachers and students failed to adequately appreciate the various reimaginings they were in for, NSVF had an answer for that too: a $200 million ad campaign to “foster understanding and demand.”

Now, I’ve mentioned the Gratton/Edenhoffer framework a few times this year as a new way to frame my thinking about education policies. But I also incorporated Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public in that same initial post. I haven’t mentioned it as much but these articles about parents’ frustration with edtech make me think about a Gurri-style revolt.

The point Gurri would remind us about is that the public will, through the torrent of information, latch on to some kind of school change that they think schools should undertake, grow frustrated that it isn’t happening fast enough, and look for options to either sidestep the institution or destroy it altogether. By the time institutions are ready to respond to the revolt, demands have changed.

I think it fits pretty well. We demanded schools adopt technology, in part out of emergency teaching during covid but largely because of a combination of elite reformer advocacy and a sincere belief that kids simply needed to use more tech if they were going to live in a tech-filled world. That was the prior information environment and it made people impatient with the poor quality and pace of tech adopted by schools. We’re in a new information environment where there’s lots of bad news about tech in schools. Schools, having just spent a fortune on edtech are now caught in a cross-current between parent pressure to scale back tech and elite pressure to bring in AI. Gurri would bet on the parents’ revolt to ultimately succeed, but that they won’t be happy either way.

Instructional Illusions

There’s a new(ish) book out from some authors I’ve mentioned here repeatedly. Instructional Illusions aims to explain why practices that sometimes feel successful ultimately aren’t and I think it’s prime Scholastic Alchemy material. Paul Kirshner, one of the authors, gives an overview here and some of their points should sound familiar to my readers.

Kirshner starts off strong with the engagement illusion.

The first illusion is the idea that if students are engaged, they’re learning. Of course, engagement matters. The problem is that engagement has become a dangerously elastic term. A classroom can be buzzing with discussion, movement, collaboration, and attractive artefacts while students remain, cognitively speaking, exactly where they started. They’re behaviorally and/or emotionally engaged, but NOT cognitively engaged, and that’s what’s needed to learn.

The question, then, isn’t whether students are active. The question is: active in thinking about what? If the task doesn’t focus attention on the knowledge and concepts to be learned, engagement becomes little more than a stage effect. It looks impressive. It photographs well. It may even feel good. But feeling good about an activity isn’t the same as learning from it.

Later, he mentions that there is also a motivation illusion. While we tend to think that motivation leads to academic success, the opposite is probably more accurate. Academically successful students become motivated.

Telling students to believe in themselves, to love learning, or to develop a growth mindset in the abstract may sound uplifting, but it often has little effect unless students are actually becoming more competent in a specific domain. Competence is motivating. Progress is motivating. Being able to do something you couldn’t do before is motivating. That’s why breaking material into manageable steps, maintaining a high success rate during guided practice, and giving actionable feedback matter so much.

Last summer I wrote that I was skeptical of engagement and motivation and made a similar point. I also connected edtech adoption with flawed theories of engagement so that’s a nice synergy with the edtech links above.

Kirshner summarizes eight other illusions that educators should watch out for: illusions of expertise, transfer, performance, that student-centered always being best, that students’ uniqueness requires everything to be individualized, that innovations always produce better outcomes, that there are easy-wins in the classroom, and that discovery learning is always appropriate. The post is worth checking out and I’ll probably grab the book at some point. He closes,

Education is full of things that seem to work, look right, and feel persuasive. But teaching shouldn’t be judged by how convincing it appears in the moment. It should be judged by what students still know, understand, and can do later. The eyes and ears are easily fooled. Teachers, if they’re to be properly professional, need something better than appearances. They need evidence, theory, and judgment.

Thanks for reading!