Links and Commentary 10/24/25

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.

Checking in on AZ Vouchers

PBS News Hour is in the middle of a series on education. Last week, they did a segment on school vouchers in Arizona.

Much of the territory is stuff that I’ve mentioned before. Few of the students who use vouchers are moving out of public school, so the vouchers are adding costs to the state budget. The public school students who do leave and take advantage of vouchers are from wealthy families and the state’s “good” public and charter schools are losing enrollment faster than the rest. None of that should be a surprise and anyone considering whether they would support vouchers or ESAs (vouchers but even more permissive) should take note of what happens in states with actually existing voucher programs. As an interesting side note, Georgia just cut their voucher program citing the increased expense. Maybe it’s not as inevitable as we thought.

But, what I appreciated most in this video was time spent talking to the parents who’ve put their kids into voucher-funded non-school programs. Here are a few of my observations:

• A lot of these things that aren’t school look an awful lot like school but with more individual attention and less time spent on instruction. Kids might do Khan Academy for 2 hours and then spend the rest of their time on discovery learning activities related to their STEM curriculum. This seems great for engagement and motivation because these parent-educators have found a way to minimize the stuff that all the kids hate, academic instruction.

• As one of the parents says, they “found the best yoga teacher, the best chess coach, and the best robotics teacher.” At a public school, these things would be electives or extracurricular activities at best and nonexistent at worse. In the micro-school in the video, these appear to be the core of what these parent-educators care about providing to their kids. Which, hey, maybe it’s great that kids get to do yoga with an excellent yoga teacher, but how are they doing on fractions? For that we’re back to computer based instruction and there’s no sense from the video of whether or not these kids are learning anything that we (used to) consider important for all kids to learn. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t and nobody checks, not even NPR. What I’d like to learn from these parents is what they envision as the long-term trajectory for their kids. Are they going to college? Does college care that they had a great yoga teacher weekly from 6th-12th grade? How does that affect their SAT scores? Do future employers want to hire 18-year-olds who made great Lego robots and learned to code using Lego’s proprietary robot no-code visual language? Or, perhaps, do the parents plan on just hiring these kids into the family business? Maybe they haven’t even thought that far ahead?

• The parents/micro-school director all express concern about specific things public schools weren’t doing for their kids. None of them say something like “public school wasn’t providing my kid with and advanced, rigorous education.” Instead we hear about kids with behavior problems, kids getting bullied, and school safety. I think these are super underrated problems that will be hard for schools to solve. Certainly schools cannot, on their own, make America a sane nation with regard to guns. School shootings will continue forever because we like dead kids more than we like getting rid of guns. Bullying and behavior are core concerns of schools, though, but remain difficult problems to solve. Much of that is based on culture and one parent specifically says it’s important for her son to have teachers who look like him and understand his culture. I doubt anything even remotely close to DEI will be present in schools under the current climate, certainly not an deep red Arizona, and even in supposedly more accepting, diversity friendly states we have tons of segregation.

• They turn to a public school district superintendent and it’s really interesting because he makes a point I hadn’t considered before. He says that many of the kids who leave to do voucher-based stuff aren’t successful there and come back to the school district behind their peers. He points out that by law public schools have to keep a certain pace at moving through the curriculum (lol, accountability is dead?) whereas there’s no pressure for parents or micro-schools or privates to have to pace themselves that way. Kids might spend a month learning a topic that schools can only devote a week to. Maybe this is a problem, maybe it’s not. It all depends on your perspective. Like, maybe it’s okay that some population of kids is behind but actually learned the stuff that they did spend time on as opposed to being moved through a curriculum at a high pace and learning much less. I guess we’ll find out. Again, I think it’s really important to know what parents who choose these vouchers think they’re doing for their kids in the long run by making these choices and seeing if we think their vision matches the reality on the tail end.

I know I’m spending a long time on this first link but so much of what’s changing in education right now depends on how we approach and learn from voucher programs, who uses them, why, and to what end. What’s really interesting here is that, despite lots of discussion between liberals, the left, and among Democrats about how schools aren’t rigorous enough and aren’t accountable enough, whenever we see parents represented in the media, their perspective has little to do with rigor. It really seems like the parents want deeper learning at a slower pace, less standardization, more personalization, more extracurricular hands-on type stuff, and are deeply concerned about safety and behavior. Trying to answer these concerns by doing more phonics and re-implementing test-based accountability will miss the mark with these people. No wonder they’re happy to elect Republicans who will give them money to have the kind of educational experience they want for their kids. The longer term problem, though, is how having a highly variable educational output — e.g. kids who maybe learned yoga and robotics but not physics and trig — will impact the labor market, higher ed, and economy. We have that variation now even with 95%+ kids going to public school, so maybe it’s not actually that much of a problem? Who knows? We’re running the experiment, so we will find out.

NoLa Charterization 20 Years Later

In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, the entirety of New Orleans public schools were turned into a charter system. No traditional public schools remained. In some versions of this story, it’s a great success because lots of “bad” teachers were fired and many neighborhood schools closed and consolidated. The charters that returned were more financially efficient, spending less per pupil and getting more time and effort out of their teachers. Beyond that, test scores improved somewhat from what they’d previously been and graduation rates went up. Reform-oriented publications are out there calling the whole experiment a success. Others are more circumspect, noting that the successes today are built on a lot of failures that left a lot of kids with poor-quality education in the mean-time.

Into that mix of history, a local resident has written an account of both the charterization changes and connected that with a longer history of schooling in Louisiana. The summary blurb tells you enough to know that if you’re not open to discussion of race and racism, you’ll assume the school reforms were a success.

Tom Utican, silicon valley techie turned teacher, has covered similar territory recently arguing that we’re being misled by today’s claims of success.

More Phonics Commentary

It looks like I’m not the only one trying to temper expectations around phonics.

(Again, to be clear, I agree that early elementary kids should receive explicit structured phonics instruction but it needs to be part of a larger language learning curriculum that includes oral language development, building deep knowledge useful in future learning, and supporting fluency and comprehension as decoding skills take shape. I believe that is what’s closest to the actual science people invoke when they talk about the science of reading.)

Paul Thomas, a literacy professor at Furman University, fact-checks an editorial in the Washington Post saying that phonics “won” the reading wars. In particular, he challenges the claim that California passed a Science of Reading law similar to Mississippi’s (note the capitalization to indicate an unscientific, branded, and dogmatic view of reading instruction). What I want to highlight, though, is his mentioning of the history of literacy instruction in California and previous fights in “the reading wars”.

You see, one of the key things that proponents of the Science of Reading keep saying is that schools have never taught the Science of Reading. It’s super essential to their story, apparently, to insist that the Science of Reading is something we have tons of evidence for but also have never tried to do in schools. I’ve pointed out before that we actually have a recent history of trying scientifically-based reading instruction in the US, it was called Reading First. Thomas’ post adds another important layer. A decade before reading first, California was in the grips of a literacy controversy. Their NAEP scores were dropping through the late 80s and early 90s and the consensus was that the problem was inadequate reading instruction. Specifically, California was said to be beholden to “whole language” instruction and that they needed to reorient their reading curriculum around explicit phonics instruction. In 1997-98, California’s legislature passed a variety of laws phasing out whole language instruction and requiring evidence based literacy curricula and banning any kind of multi-lingual instruction in favor of near-total English immersion for English language learners.

It’s important to remember that we have, in fact, tried using legislation to mandate teaching reading according to “the evidence” or “the research”. In fact, we seem to do this roughly every 10-15 years but instead of following “the evidence” or “the research” or “the science” we follow an all-too-narrow pathway that focuses exclusively on foundational skills like phonological awareness and phonics to the detriment of various other components of literacy. Then we all look around and scratch our heads about why reading scores are largely unchanged or only improve in 4th grade and not in 8th.

Digging through a few of Thomas’ links brought me back to this report from 1997 about the increase in academic rigor, including stricter standards and more standardized tests, leading to little meaningful change in NAEP scores.

Her larger point comes a few paragraphs later:

To bring the discussion around to today’s topics of interest, this makes me think of Mississippi and how the media are so quick to point to retention and phonics but give little coverage to the robust system of teacher coaching and professional development that helps them implement the curriculum well. If the only lesson we learn is more phonics, more testing, more rigor, then we are not learning the right lessons.

The Los Angeles Miracle?

Oh, right, miracles only happen in the South for some reason. Since we’re talking about California, EdSource, a California based education-focused journalism organization, reports that Los Angeles has seen sustained positive growth on state exams (exams that supposedly blue states don’t do anymore, mind you).

Of course these aren’t the NAEP scores and we can’t get those disaggregated by local jurisdictions anyway, but it’s still good to see a city that has traditionally underperformed the state close that gap and outperform its own pre-pandemic scores. It does rub me the wrong way when the discourse fails to acknowledge gains like these and one reason has to do with the lack of an easy sell behind this push. LAUSD didn’t go all in on retaining low-performing students, didn’t go all in on phonics, and doesn’t have conservative leadership who “aren’t supposed to be good at education but somehow are.” There’s nobody to scold about LAUSD’s success so commentators ignore it. Nobody can coin a cool phrase like “the southern surge” with LAUSD’s state test score growth. And that should tell you something about the more attention getting Mississippi Miracle and southern surge.

To what do we credit these scores?

How about that?

Cellphone Bans Boost Achievement

Loathe as I am to compliment Florida, they did move quickly in empowering school districts to ban cellphones. Now we have a new study of the effects of that ban. You can take a look if you’re interested but let’s let The Hechinger Report give us a summary:

However, temper your expectations:

Even more states have implemented bans and I’m sure there will be more studies. I’m excited to see those outcomes.

Thanks for reading!