Education Reads to Start Your Week, May 18th

The Problem Is Scholastic Alchemy, Curriculum Buyer's Remorse, Deliberations Around State-Led Curriculum Reform

Author

James Shanahan
May 18, 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!

Scholastic Alchemy is the Problem

My first link is a few weeks old at this point but I’m still playing catch-up. Nick Potkalitsky writes about AI and Education and penned a post about how states are now shifting to ban screen time on the devices that schools themselves have distributed. Nick is a bit of an AI-in-education optimist but not so far as to be a boring industry parrot (god, there are so many of those now). He’s generally bullish but recognizes that we really don’t have a good idea about how to implement today’s AI products into instruction and that many of those difficulties stem from different stakeholders having dramatically different understandings of basic things like, what is learning? That’s why I really wanted to link the screen time article because I think the opening paragraph perfectly encapsulates the concept of Scholastic Alchemy.

Somewhere in a statehouse right now, two committees are drafting legislation on a collision course. One is working on AI literacy graduation requirements. The other is writing a bill that would cap a high school student’s interactive screen time at ten hours for the entire school year. This is the state of education technology policy in 2026.

Regardless of what you think about AI in schools or screentime or whatever, we can all recognize that education is full of self-defeating policies. We can also recognize that schools will, as always, take the blame when a few years have gone by and these policies have nullified each other. We’ll get another round of think pieces about the need to hold teachers accountable, or how schools didn’t follow research-driven AI literacy curricula, or how kids need to be freed from “failing” public schools by embracing vouchers. We’ll ask ourselves how we could have been so dumb for embracing screens and phones. We’ll ask ourselves how we could have been so dumb for failing to embrace better AI literacy. We’ll fail to see the connection between acting on both impulses simultaneously. Perhaps both approaches would be good in isolation. Perhaps neither approach is good. I can confidently say that requiring students to learn about technologies that they are almost forbidden from using in school will not work.

Curriculum Buyer’s Remorse

Rachel Gabriel reminds us that buying a curriculum is only one part of the puzzle and that districts may be feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse. Like Potkalitsky above, she makes the point that how organizations define things matters.

HQIM was sold the way teacher effectiveness was sold under Race to the Top: not as a piece of an interconnected puzzle, but as THE missing piece to which no educator had ever paid enough attention.

HQIM means High Quality Instructional Materials and it was meant to pressure curriculum publishers to produce better materials to support instruction. However, the old XKCD comic about creating a new standard applies here.

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Back to Rachel:

EdReports focuses on standards-alignment, The Reading League focuses on alignment to its definition of Science of Reading (SoR), The Knowledge Matters tool focuses on background knowledge development, The Culturally Responsive Curriculum Scorecard focuses on, you guessed it: cultural responsiveness. States and districts each create their own processes, including or inspired by one or more of these tools. This partially explains why no two states has the same list of approved programs listed as high quality or SoR or state law-aligned.

11 states that have published lists of approved materials, including anywhere between 3 and 12 choices. Out of 16 programs that appear across all state lists, 4 are only on one list. Two appear on almost every state list. The two you might have guessed if you were around for the last round of state-led curriculum reform 25 years ago, the two published by the historic “big five” education publishers that carry most of the market: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Into Reading (owned by Veritas Capital) and McGraw Hill’s Wonders (owned by Platinum Equity). Both owned by private equity, and benefitting from robust corporate infrastructure.

One reason this happens is because of a fundamental misunderstanding baked into the policies themselves.

Curriculum is “necessary but not sufficient” tool for instructional improvement. It is selected, adapted, revised, delivered and used by human people. Humans, not materials, teach children. We lack rafts of studies of curriculum efficacy because it is nearly impossible to pin an effect on a program when it is so clear that teachers use the same materials differently based on their own individual differences (who they are, what they know, value and feel supported/free to do) and the school’s conditions for learning: the infrastructural elements that set and limit what curriculum can be used to do. Many of the studies that people hail as proof a curricular program works are actually studies of comprehensive reforms that included changes in training, coaching, scheduling and class composition. That was certainly true in Mississippi

Put another way, “High Quality Instructional Material policies assume quality is a characteristic of the materials themselves independent of the contexts in which they are used. It’s not.” I think this is a pretty essential point. She even reminds us that policy successes such as Mississippi’s 4th grade reading scores, are the result of more than just curriculum reforms.

Some of that buyer’s remorse may be because teachers need training and support with the new materials. They may need to modify and adapt the materials for their contexts. There may be important supplemental materials that most districts never use (looking at you i-Ready). The point is, as with many other aspects of schooling, there’s no easy fix from buying the right product or changing the right law.

Deliberations Around State-Led Curriculum Reform

We’ve got a nice theme this week, don’t we? Michael Petrilli checks in on some ongoing arguments about the role of state micromanagement of curriculum. One one side of the argument is Robert Pondiscio, who wants to see states putting more pressure on districts to conform to their expectations. He uses Mississippi as an example.

One detail from the webinar has stayed with me [Pondiscio]: Mississippi officials would regularly review lists of which districts were sending teachers to literacy training, and if a district wasn’t participating, they picked up the phone and called the superintendent. That may sound mundane, but it’s not. It’s what seriousness and accountability looks like in practice: Someone notices an issue and follows up. Behavior changes and outcomes follow. Contrast this with the way that too often we think about reform: pass a bill, announce an initiative and funding, hold a press conference, and assume the field will absorb it (or worse, assume the capacity already exists to execute), as if a school is a smartphone receiving a software update.

The other side is characterized by Terry Ryan’s call for “tight-loose” policies that allow for more (not total) local autonomy.

This is a model worth building on: the state sets clear expectations and measures outcomes, but leaves the methods to educators. If we believe in limited government, local control, and accountability, we should apply those same principles to civics and history education policy.

The role of the state is not to dictate every lesson taught in every classroom. It is to set high standards, ensure transparency, and hold schools accountable for results. When schools meet those expectations, they should be trusted with the freedom to do their work….

Mandating curriculum from Boise—however well-intentioned—moves us in the opposite direction, toward centralized control and away from the local innovation that has long defined Idaho education.

We can achieve strong civics education without sacrificing local control. We can promote patriotism without prescribing pedagogy. And we can hold schools accountable without tying their hands.

Petrilli asks the right question: What if states get it wrong?

It’s not merely an academic concern! Balanced literacy was the “evidence-based” curriculum reform that came about in response to NCLB requiring evidence-based curriculum. We see in both of the earlier posts I linked that states can and do pursue contradictory and self-defeating policies.

So that’s the rub. If states are going to push, prod, or outright command districts to adopt certain curricula, hire certain vendors, and adopt certain approaches, they’d better be right. And though we know a lot about “the science of reading,” we know a lot less than we might want to admit about which particular programs and people are good at getting those practices adopted effectively in real-world classrooms. And if that’s true for early literacy, it’s doubly so for math, civics, and everything else.

Now, Petrilli is something of a center-right reform guy so I don’t always agree with his preferred policies but I think he’s correct here to point out the dilemma we all face. Education in the US is largely under the legal stewardship of the states but is historically locally controlled. States have a poor tract record on education policy interventions and don’t seem to be improving on it save for a few possible bright spots (only time will tell). What’s more, as local control is diminished and bureaucratic elites empowered, voters begin to reject education policies more strongly. This undermines the durability of any reforms, even if they are good in the long run. To me, this means there is an equilibrium but it’s one that settles for far more variation in scholastic outcomes in order to achieve a happier public that likes and supports their local schools. To many reformers, accepting lower test scores or weaker forms of accountability is in and of itself anathema so I’m not sure we’ll ever see much traction on that front. Instead, I fear we’re doomed to cycles of technocratic school reforms and public backlash until eventually the whole system collapses as unworkable.

Thanks for reading!