Links and Commentary 10/31/25

More On Gifted Programs, NAEP Cohort Scores, Alpha School Blues, The Love of Reading, PSLF Rules Finalized

Author

James Shanahan
October 31, 2025

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 Gifted Programs

Justin Baeder was, I think, a school administrator of some kind before moving into supporting educational leadership and keeps an active social media presence. He’s a bit of a heterodox thinker at times and I find I disagree with his positions about as often as I agree with them. Still, he’s a voice that I respect because I think he’s a true believer in the potential of public education and wants the public to see teaching as a respectable profession with evidence-based practices, quality curriculum, and lots of institutional support.

Anyway, Baeder posted a TikTok recently making an argument that should sound familiar to my readers. Namely, that Gifted and Talented programs are not meant to be vehicles for advanced academic coursework. Schools should just offer advanced coursework and let gifted programs support the unique needs of gifted kids.

Moreover, what I think Baeder is saying is something that I wrote about on Wednesday. Parents and the public want schools with lots of options. In this case, he says kids need a chance to take advanced classes, move up a grade in a subject, or pursue other kinds of rigor without having to be part of a testing regime like the one in NYC. Gifted programs were never meant to do this and using all kinds of selective screenings heightens inequality and reduces the services for gifted children. You can find more of his stuff on Substack.

NAEP Cohort Scores

Last month I complained about the historical revisionism surrounding No Child Left Behind and argued it was not appropriate to call it a success. As part of that post, I did something that I almost never see anyone in the education journalism/commentary space do, and that’s look at cohorts of test takers. That is, instead of comparing all the 4th graders in 2005 and then comparing all the 4th graders in 2009 and then comparing all the 4th graders in 2013, we should instead look at those 2005 4th graders again when they are in 8th grade and again when they are in 12th grade. We should be taking a longitudinal look at a cohort of students to see how they progress through the school system and whether the gain or lose proficiency as time goes on. It turns out that the cohort educated under NCLB lost ground in 8th and 12th grade. They became less proficient over time and that, to me, should not be looked at as a success.

Recently, two different pieces came across my feed that make a similar point. First we have Peter Green, who looks at the 1992 cohort of test takers. 1992 features a historic low point for 4th grade NAEP reading scores. If we follow the logic of people who regularly panic about low NAEP scores, then there should be some demonstrable bad effects resulting from this cohort of ultra-low performers.

if you are going to hang an entire panic attack on those low scores and write an entire article about how the current low scores are a sign of an epic crisis of failure in education, shouldn’t you be able to finish the sentence “Because the NAEP reading scores have dipped so low, the nation will suffer as a consequence the following...” Particularly when we are absolutely in a position to study exactly what scores of this lowitude produce as a result.

Otherwise, your panic is manufactured baloney. Because the story here might be, “Back in 1992 we had the lowest NAEP reading scores ever and that was followed by life going on as before. Those low scores didn’t signal a damned thing.”

Coming from a different perspective (The Fordham Institute is probably politically opposite of Peter Greene in most things education), we have Michael Petrilli who makes an awfully similar point. You may remember back in Sept. when the 12th grade NAEP scores came out and were very low? Well, if you think in terms of cohorts, you might think to look back at how those seniors scored in 8th grade or even in 4th grade. Petrilli did just that.

The cohort of students who scored at record-low levels in 12th grade reading were part of the same generation of kids who scored at record-high levels in fourth grade.

Now, Petrilli is making the case that cell phones are responsible for the declines but I think there’s a more important lesson to learn here. NAEP scores can only tell us so much. If the lowest 4th grade scores ever didn’t yield doom and gloom for the US economy in the late 90s and early 2000s when those kids became adults, and the highest scores ever faded by the time those kids ended up in high school, how useful are these scores? What policy decisions should we make knowing that NAEP scores don’t tell us much about students’ long-term proficiency or life outcomes?

I don’t ask these questions because I’m some kind of opponent of testing overall or because I dislike the NAEP or anything like that. Rather, I want us making informed decisions about education policy, curriculum, and teacher practices based on accurate interpretations of the data. We hear about NAEP scores going up (only in 4th grade ELA and ever anything else) and they’re called a miracle. Taking a longer view, it’s not a slam-dunk that high 4th grade ELA scores on the NAEP are indicative of anything beyond what they explicitly tell us about students’ ELA proficiency in the 4th grade.

For example, if you follow the dominant narrative today, kids in elementary schools in 2015 should have been getting terrible reading scores because they were not learning much phonics. They were also, according to some, the first group of kids in decades to learn without school accountability because the Obama administration started giving out NCLB waivers in 2010 before these kids entered kindergarten. Without phonics and without school accountability, these kids somehow earned the best 4th grade NAEP scores ever. Today we are being sold a story that says all we need is phonics and school accountability. One reason I’m happy to see two writers look at NAEP scores in terms of cohorts is because it helps us all see through the thin evidence of these stories and ask better questions about what’s working and what’s not.

Alpha School Blues

WIRED has an expose on Alpha school and interviews a dozen former staff, students, and parents. I mentioned a portion of it briefly in this week’s post on comprehensive high schools. What I found so interesting was that parents were not sending their kids to Alpha in order to get more rigorous and advanced academic training. Instead, the school’s promise of 2 hours of academics with the rest of the day being enrichment was attractive to parents. Others worried about bullying or safety in the public schools. Still others wanted less rigidity for their kids or a flexible schedule for themselves. This compliments some earlier discussion I had about what voucher parents said they wanted for their kids. Very few parents are actually chasing schools that would be academically harder for their kids. School choice and vouchers are giving parents the ability to send their kids to less rigorous, unaccountable schools.

All of that is a little bit tangential the thrust of the WIRED article which, in my reading, explains that Alpha is a combination of two things: relentlessly teaching to the test and intense selection effects. It seems like subjects that are not tested by the schools “AI” learning software (it’s IXL, guys, nothing special and thousands of public schools use it too) are not really taught.

Students and families from Alpha School Brownsville who spoke to WIRED say younger age groups at the school lacked a dedicated social studies or history curriculum, though older kids learned those subjects.

This is the same shit we see in public schools where elementary students are only held accountable for math and reading so the schools spend like 70-80% of their time on math and reading. Speaking of reading, I know this next part will sound familiar.

Brownsville parents said they also saw other gaps in their kids’ educations. One parent says that when their son left Alpha as an 8-year-old, he could read words quickly but didn’t comprehend what he was reading. When he enrolled as a third grader at his new school, the parent says, he was writing at a kindergarten level. And when writing by hand, he would get to the end of a line and curve down into the margins, not knowing he was supposed to move to the next line. “All Alpha taught him was read fast, learn your vocabulary, and move on,” the parent says.

It’s test prep! This is all just test prep. They want the scores on IXL (or whatever they’re moving to now) to show that they’re better than some comparator group. Of course when asked, Alpha did not provide any data to WIRED. It’s always helpful when data remains proprietary because then you can claim whatever you want. The article is also full of kids getting tons of pressure to meet certain metrics and the well-known consequences of that pressure.

Over the next weekend, Barrios says, she and her husband sat with their daughter for hours each day until she finished the multiplication lesson, even as she broke down and sobbed that she’d rather die than keep going. Ultimately, Barrios says she double-checked all the answers on a calculator before the 9-year-old entered them. But when the girl returned to school with the lesson completed, her mom says, she came back reporting crushing news: in the time she had spent stuck, she had fallen even farther behind her targeted goals.

In order to catch up, the little girl stopped eating at school so that she could work through snack and lunch time. Her doctor reported she lost weight and wrote a note to the school to allow her some extra chances to eat, but the school claims to have never received the note. According to the little girl, “staff at the school said she didn’t earn her snacks and wouldn’t get them until she had met her learning metrics.” If you’re at all familiar with no-excuses charter schools then these tactics are probably familiar to you. It’s how charter schools get rid of kids who are underperforming. They make school so miserable and difficult that parents pull their kids out, saving the schools from having to work harder to support a struggling kid. Selection effects, folks, that’s all they’re doing. That’s the secret sauce.

Definitely give the whole thing a read. There’s this whole other surveillance thing going on where kids are being watched by their school devices even when they’re not at school and are getting disciplined for “anti-patterns” such as wearing pajamas and talking to family members. If this is the future, count me and my kids out.

Oh wait, one more thing. At Alpha, they get to do shit that would get any public-school teacher fired:

Another parent, who withdrew their son from Alpha Brownsville, says guides offered to buy him something from Amazon if he retook a standardized test and improved his score.

Yeah, even letting a kid retake a standardized test would be grounds for investigation, much less the bribe. Clearly rigor is not Alpha’s thing.

The Love of Reading

Curriculum Insights Project reposts a twitter thread from Catlin Goodrow. Catlin details how instilling a love of reading doesn’t have to mean getting cozy by yourself with a “just right book” that you read perfectly independently. Indeed, reading together as a class or in groups can also foster a love of reading. But, there’s a more important point that Catlin makes which gets beyond the love and into the learning.

Because the teacher is in the mix, guiding and supporting, the conversations around the book will often be deeper – not for some, but for all students. I vividly remember a group of my fourth graders discussing the definition of the word refugee, with a student from Ukraine taking the lead in the discussion. All of these were students who supposedly read two-three grades below level, but because they had support, were able to read above their “instructional level” (and had massive amounts of reading growth by the end of the year). If we’d stayed at their “level” they would have had fewer opportunities to build their knowledge and vocabulary.

It’s not appropriate just to give kids grade-level text or to limit them to books only at their reading level. They need a chance to encounter challenging texts and complex ideas communicated in written language which, if properly supported, allow them to grow as readers. You know, the opposite of what Alpha School is doing. The post also includes some helpful links so do check it out.

PSLF Rules Finalized

After a period of public comment, the Department of Education and the Trump admin have finalized their rules for employers that qualify for public service loan forgiveness. If you were hoping for a clear and easy to interpret rule, do I have bad news for you.

The Trump administration released a final rule on Thursday that restricted who could participate in a student loan forgiveness program for public servants, making it easier to push out employers who engage in activities that it deems to have “a substantial illegal purpose.”

Those employers could include organizations that work with undocumented immigrants, for example, or provide gender-affirming care to children under the age of 19, among others.

The Trump administration argues that taxpayer funds should not subsidize illegal activity, but critics of the new rule say it gives the government broad tools to politicize the program and target groups that do not align with its values.

Seeing how they’ve operated so far, I expect those critics are correct. If you work for any organization that the president or his minions don’t like, you now have to live with the worry that your employer suddenly won’t qualify. I’ve mentioned in the past that this poses a particular potential cost to me and my family. And, as I keep saying, the DOE will not go away. It’s too valuable of a tool for the administration to simply let it go. They can use PSLF as yet another cudgel to enforce their preferred ideological outcomes.

Thanks for reading!