Links and Commentary 10/10/25

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

More on Mississippi

Discussion of the “Mississippi Miracle” continues and it’s worth looking at the back and forth. Freddie DeBoer thinks the whole thing will prove to be either fraud or the product of some temporary gain due to a policy change. It’ll fade, he says, and we shouldn’t be overly credulous toward reformers given their track record. If you read what I wrote in the links two weeks ago, that’s definitely something I am worried about, too. Nobody should ignore the fairly recent history of “miracles,” always in southern states and always based on 4th grade reading NAEP scores, that ended up being anything but. That said, when I looked at the Mississippi NAEP scores, it really does seem like there are some durable gains being made in 4th grade and that they’re even starting to be visible in 8th grade scores. Karen Vitiates and Kelsey Piper at The Argument made a strong case this week, in response to DeBoer, that the gains are real and are not the product of fraud.

One of their main points, too, is something that I tried to highlight in my own post about it: there were multiple changes to policy, curriculum, teacher training, and student accountability and we should be discussing all of them. I noted three components of the reforms, but they argue there are four:

1. Mandatory screening of students in grades K-3, three times a year, using approved assessment tools, to monitor how early reading skills are developing

2. Focused efforts to improve curriculum quality in schools — for phonics and other aspects of literacy

3. Large-scale efforts to train teachers

4. Retention policies to hold back students who aren’t reading successfully by the end of third grade

I really appreciate the increased attention these writers are giving to the whole set of changes that have been happening in Mississippi. I feel their sense of exasperation here. It always bothered me that the “miracle” is always chalked up to phonics and retention when so much else was included in the reform package. This is the problem with framing things as miracles.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that this is entirely a conversation being held among liberals, the left, and Democrats. Conservatives have decided that Mississippi probably still spends too much money on education and isn’t generating enough “ROI” despite the gains on NAEP. They have really stopped talking about improving education outcomes altogether and have started focusing whether education matches parents’ values instead. It’s worth remembering that because if reformers show up and start talking about test scores and standards, they may alienate large chunks of parents. Conservative families today may not even think these scores constitute a miracle or anything to be excited about because they distrust testing altogether.

Another point I made two weeks ago that I would like these journalists and commentators to take up are the gains Mississippi has made in NAEP math scores. While they are not as disproportionately high as the reading scores, they’ve been able to sustain long-term growth in math scores. Strangely, there never seem to be “miracles” related to math scores and media coverage rarely focuses on mathematics outcomes. Why is that? Were there similar reforms related to math accountability and curriculum and all that? Nobody knows!

One problem for Mississippi is that even with those 4th grade reading gains, they are still in 41st place for 8th grade NAEP reading scores. It’s hard to want to emulate reforms that, while impactful, seem to be less impactful as time goes on. On Mississippi’s own state testing regime, the ones they use for points 1 and 4 in the quote above, scores dropped this year for the first time since the pandemic. Why? What impact does that have on their screening and retention program? Will scores recover or continue to slide? Why don’t those scores get motioned in these conversations?

Rather than invoke the language of miracles, acts of god that cannot be replicated or influenced by human efforts, we should be doing careful policy evaluation. When proponents of Mississippi’s policies insist that the key for these changes is that retention policies are changing the behaviors of adults, we should demand evidence that this is, indeed, the case in Mississippi. We should know 1) did adults’ behaviors actually change? 2) which adults: parents, teachers, admins? 3) did those changes in behavior lead to improvements in NAEP scores? When you invoke the language of miracles, you are asking everyone to take it on faith, and that’s not how we should be making school policy.

Also, just because I can’t help myself, something seems off about claiming that retention is a great policy that has big impacts BUT ALSO claiming that retention is rarely used so it can’t artificially boost scores by cutting out the bottom scoring test takers. Which is it? Does it work or is it never used? If it’s never used, how can it work? Why promote retention as a policy if you also say it’s not used? Something isn’t right about this, and I suspect that we’re getting retention lumped in because some people just like the idea of retention. When I see these kinds of logical roundabouts forming in advocacy for reforms, I get worried that we’re not being presented accurate information. I need to know more here.

Anyway, let’s drop the “miracle” schtick, look at all of the policies (as opposed to the two that reformers seem to hype) and conduct evaluations of those policies to determine if they are indeed producing the gains. Otherwise, we’re doing scholastic alchemy. We’re implementing policies that we are told will work, expecting our student outcomes to turn into gold based on faith, and risk finding out later that we continue to have merely lead. In ten years, Freddie DrBoer can write another post about how reformers were once again fooled into believing in a miracle. Or, you know, let’s do it right?

The Department Lives

I’ve said before that I seriously doubt that the US Department of Education will actually be shut down, even though some of its functions may be transferred over to other departments. One reason I think this is because conservatives in the Trump administration would prefer to be able to use the DoE to accomplish their ideological goals and punish their enemies. Why let public schools in blue states continue to do woke things when you can use the DoE to pressure them to conform?

Anyway, at the end of last month, the Department of Education submitted a request for public comment about reforming the Institute for Education Sciences, the DoE’s research arm. You have five days to give your feedback. A week before that, they posted several job openings in the IES. It’s not clear, exactly, what the role of the IES will be going forward given all the grants and research that they cancelled at the start of 2025 but if you look at how the rest of the administration works, my assumption is that, like with MAHA stuff over at the NHS, they will be producing “research” to justify their policy designs. Either way, the DoE is not going away anytime soon.

Disaster Curriculum

Hechinger Report has a post about schools adding training in disaster preparedness and response to their curricula.

Way back in March I wrote a post related to this topic and I’m quite happy to see schools and community colleges take a more proactive role in disaster preparedness. My worry back then was that too much focus was being placed on the academic consequences of disaster-based disruptions to schooling and very little attention given to the larger consequences for communities and infrastructure. Courses like these offer kids and adults a way to respond to and process disasters, they increase students’ sense agency in emergency situations, and they acknowledge an important reality.

Seems like someone’s getting the message!

Columbus Day Redux

The Times reviews Matthew Restall’s new biography of Christopher Columbus, The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus. Restall makes the case that, like so many other historical figures, modern people project our anxieties and sensibilities onto them and we’ve been doing so basically since his death.

Systems, it seems, continue to be greater than great men.

Democrats Increase Inequality and Segregation

Also in the Times, David Brooks pens an opinion piece claiming that Democrats increase inequality, often through school policy. Now, a proper response to Brooks would probably require a full post and I’m sure others will write replies of their own. His focus is on national test scores, the NAEP that we’re so fond of mentioning. Brooks, like so many others, falls into the same incorrect interpretation of recent school policy. The belief he so desperately wants to cling to is that democrats have been the enemies of accountability and testing when it’s pretty clearly the opposite. More important than which politicians have been behind which reforms, though, is how public opinion about schools, standardization, and testing have changed since the school reform era Brooks pines for.

I’ve put four posts together along these lines and you can read them for yourself (here, here, here, and here). I’ve also written a pair of posts outlining the grand political bargain, or treaty, that kept education reforms within the boundaries of a particular set of parameters (here and here). That treaty, mind you, fell apart at the tail end of the Obama years and ushered in the current, uncertain era in education policy. Still, I think Brooks makes an important point at the end.

While I think “proven” may be too strong here, I do think he’s right that urban school systems need a closer look. Unlike Brooks, I think the we should start with one important disconnect: diversity. Cities and states run by the party most associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion, are also the most racially segregated.

What may be inconvenient for reform-era liberals and for Brooks is that school choice is a major factor in today’s school segregation.

We’ve increased segregation while decreasing outcomes and equity. Seems bad?

Thanks for reading!