Links and Commentary 1/30/26

Minnesota Donation Options, CIS Gets Results, Chetty's New Banger, Bad Teacher Myth, When Coyotes aren't Coyotes

Author

James Shanahan
January 30, 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!

Minnesota Donation Options

If you’re looking to make some kind of contribution to the people of Minnesota while they peacefully resist the regime’s violent occupation and community terror campaign, here is a list of organizations you could donate to. I have not personally vetted these links but I’ve seen the list posted multiple locations so it’s not obviously a scam.

I also cannot guarantee that donating to these organizations will not make you a target for reprisals by the regime. Your president and his administration are running a complex information gathering operation alongside their roving slave immigration patrols. Donating to causes the regime opposes may get you on a list and being on a list may be dangerous to your health and wellbeing one day.

My donation is going to rent relief for families of students in Minneapolis public schools.

Communities In Schools Gets Results

One of my hobbyhorses is saying that parents and community members need to have positive and supportive interactions with their local public schools. Direct personal experience with something is one of the ways we can break out of the cycle of outrage driven by our (mis)information saturated environments. You might hear on Facebook that your local high school is putting litter boxes in classrooms for kids who identify as cats to defecate in. If you have never spent time in or around that high school and don’t know people who have spent time in or around that high school, then you might even be inclined to believe such a story and share it on social media. What if, instead, you or someone you knew well had taken night classes there, gotten the school’s help with language training, or saw an aide in the school library for help filling out employment forms? Our local schools used to be important community institutions that helped people develop their identities, served local needs, and provided comprehensive education options.

A new study demonstrates that such efforts have long-term effects. Benjamin Goldman, an assistant professor of economics at Cornell, and Jamie Gracie, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, evaluated data on more than 16 million Texas students over two decades, examining data from the Census Bureau and IRS. The found that the introduction of CIS [Communities In Schools] led to higher test scores, lower truancy rates, and fewer suspensions in Texas schools.

The program’s impact is “quite big” Gracie told me: Spending $1000 on CIS increased student earnings at age 27 by $400 whereas spending $1000 on smaller class sizes increased student earnings by $40. The researchers estimated that every $3000 in CIS investment would increase income-tax revenue by $7000.

Here’s the part I definitely want to highlight:

Although contemporary education policy has focused intently on standardized tests, student and teacher tracking, and other accountability measures, the CIS study suggests the United States could bolster achievement by providing more social support, too.

CIS workers support families in navigating public assistance programs, give English language lessons for adults, run food banks, provide violence prevention programming, work on behavioral health, counseling, and many other services. Importantly, CIS is structured to provide different supports based on local needs rather than a set of standardized interventions. They can help homeless kids and families, which is increasingly a problem for the youngest kids. CIS has been around for decades and is 5x the size of the much more well-known Head Start program. Now that we have evidence of higher test scores and increased incomes, maybe policymakers will finally care.

Well… you’ll be unsurprised to hear that Trump cut a bunch of funding for programs like these and CIS is trying to make up the difference via donations.

Chetty’s New Banger

That’s a weird title for me to link yet another economics study but I do really like Raj Chetty’s work and I think his findings support a broadly inclusive and expansive social support system, but one that is smartly targeted at making the biggest impacts. Also, a lot of this paper studied communities in and around Atlanta. Some of the people impacted by this program ended up being moved to my suburban town, Peachtree City, where I am now learning that the kids, at least, may have found better outcomes.

Anyway, the paper is here. The key thing that’s of interest to me as a schools guy is that the paper shows the importance of integration on a community.

  • Gains for Children were Driven by Stronger Social Connections with Higher-Income Neighbors. Children in revitalized public housing interacted more with higher-income neighbors and benefited most when surrounded by more affluent peers.

  • We Can Increase Economic Mobility by Better Connecting Low-Opportunity Areas. Many low income neighborhoods remain disconnected from nearby high-opportunity areas. Connecting such neighborhoods, mapped here, could increase economic mobility at scale.

There are clear lifetime benefits to kids being in communities of mixed socioeconomic status AND mixed races/ethnicities — yes, they looked at racial and ethnic composition and found positives. There are clear lifetime detriments to living in communities of concentrated poverty. Unfortunately, the impacts on adults were negligible, in part because so much “opportunity” has to do with the kinds of jobs you can get which determines your income. My suspicion is that this is a school thing but I should be clear though, the paper doesn’t mention schools so I’m just speculating.

JUST KIDDING:

We show that even holding fixed key family-level and institutional inputs—school spending, labor market conditions, and family resources—one can achieve substantial gains in mobility through neighborhood-level investments.

They argue that much of the effect could be a result of peer group composition.

Children’s outcomes are much more strongly related to those of peers in their own cohort—with whom they are likely to interact most in school—than with peers who are a year older or younger. More generally, children with higher-income peers gained more from HOPE VI even when comparing children in different demographic subgroups within the same project. These within-project comparisons rule out the possibility that the heterogeneity in treatment effects is driven by other project-level differences that are correlated with peer income, such as programmatic choices or school quality.

and

Third, using social network data from Facebook, we show that HOPE VI increased friendships between children from low- and high-income families in high schools near public housing sites. Using estimates of the causal effect of cross-class friendships on children’s incomes in adult hood from Chetty et al. (2026b), we show that the effects of HOPE VI on cross-class friendships can explain its treatment effect on children’s incomes under plausible assumptions.4

and

It is plausible that the school-level changes in EC resulting from HOPE VI were driven disproportion ately by changes in public housing residents’ friendship patterns for two reasons. First, HOPE VI had no significant impact on the cohabitation-based measure of social interaction for children living in surround ing neighborhoods (Table A.8), indicating that the social connections of public housing residents changed more than those of surrounding peers. Second, the arrival of higher-income residents in market rate units in HOPE VI sites likely changed the friendships of public housing residents most because children tend to befriend school peers who live nearby at much higher rates (Preciado et al., 2012; Liu et al., 2021; Andrews et al., 2025).

You can see how the work done by CIS relates to Chetty et al’s findings about neighborhood “revitalization.” Our communities matter and our neighbors shouldn’t always be people who are just like us in every way. Moreover, creating ghettos, as housing projects and redlining did in the early-mid 20th century, created concentrations of poverty and disprivilege that harmed the opportunities of kids for generations. It seems pretty clear to me that we need more integrated communities, more integrated local public schools, and more connections between communities and schools.

But hey, let’s roll out vouchers so all the high-income kids can be drawn out of the public school system by taxpayer subsidies. Let’s use school choice lottery mechanisms to limit access to advanced academic pathways and ensconce them away from neighborhood schools. It’s scholastic alchemy, folks! We do the opposite of what evidence suggests and wonder why things don’t get better.

Bad Teacher Myth

Paul Thomas argues that bad teachers are something of a myth. No, he’s not saying teachers who are bad at teaching don’t exist. Rather, Thomas is saying that special interest groups have built up an idea, a narrative, a myth that teachers are on the whole bad and need to be disciplined, held to standards, or even replaced. He connects this to a larger social critique about two things: women in the workplace and the rhetorical role of “science” in education policy discourse.

Autonomy, pay, and respect track positively for men and negatively for women in teaching, and the resistance to autonomy for K-12 teachers strongly correlates with the field being primarily women. A key but ignored element of education reform must include better pay for all K-12 teachers and supporting teacher autonomy so that individual student needs can be met. The historical and current resistance to teacher autonomy exposes the lingering sexism in how we view, treat, and reward educators.

Therefore, at its core, the “bad teacher” myth and requiring teachers to remain apolitical, objective, or neutral serve indirectly to further de-professionalize teachers at both the K-12 level and in teacher education. This leads to the role of science in de-professionalizing teachers.

There’s also some interesting discussion of the Science of Reading in there which largely mirrors what I’ve written about it as being more of a dogma than a science. I also find it interesting that some liberal outlets are starting to come around on the idea that “just doing phonics” isn’t enough and that the Science of Reading people are leading us astray. Will we once again blame teachers or colleges of education when it turns out that phonics alone won’t make all kids acceptably literate? If the problem is in the policies, then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to be saying that the people following policy are to blame. Are the teacher bad or are they implementing bad policy? Another fine example of scholastic alchemy at work, I guess. We’re back to drilling phonics again and blaming teachers for not knowing how to drill phonics and it’s going to work out just like it did last time! Of course, if you get all your information about education from popular podcast series, you probably think we never tried teaching phonics until the 2010s. What we won’t do is push for school integration, comprehensive schooling, and community school models.

When Coyotes aren’t Coyotes

An essay has been making the rounds explaining why doing all our reading instruction from excerpts is a really bad idea. 5th grade teacher Laura Patranella shows us what can go wrong when publishers excerpt from texts but lose some of the key contextual details that help kids make meaning.

If excerpts were truly designed to “build background knowledge,” then the ‘The Good Garden’ excerpt in our recently wrapped-up HMH module would help students understand food insecurity, sustainable agriculture, and the predatory economics faced by small farmers.

Instead, it reduces the culturally loaded and economically specific term ‘coyote’ into an isolated paragraph, strips it of context, and includes a full-page wolf/coyote man as an illustration, whose primary instructional purpose is… wait for it…figurative language.

Not only do the kids not learn what’s actually going on in the story, but they are also given the wrong impression that realistic fiction includes fantastical half-coyote men. This is pretty bad and is indicative of what standardization has done to teaching and learning. In an effort to cover all of the “skills” that we’ve enshrined in a bureaucratic set of standards in order to more easily write standardized tests so that we can produce data to hold teachers responsible for kid’s failure to learn to read, we’ve created a system that is actively working against actually teaching kids how to read.

And this is the part that irks me most: most teachers probably don’t pick up on what a coyote means in this context. Not because they’re careless or unprepared, but because the materials don’t give them a way to know.

There is no sidebar, no teacher note, no hint anywhere that coyote is an actual person - not a wild canine in jeans and plaid. Just a semi-scripted cue to find figurative language.

Unless you’ve read the book, you don’t know that the materials are wrong! And, again, we’re going to listen to people who tell us this is the teachers’ fault? That because teachers aren’t successful when they’re set up to fail like this, that we need … what? AI tutors? More testing and accountability? I feel like I’m stuck in repeat sometimes, but I really think people mindlessly listen to accusations that teachers are dumb or whatever and fail to look anywhere else for explanations of our schools’ troubles.

Thanks for reading!