Links and Commentary 11/21/25

Left-liberal learning wars, What went wrong?, Georgia Curriculum Choices, Dual Enrollment Shows the Way, Too Young for Gifted Testing

Author

James Shanahan
November 21, 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.

Left vs Liberal Learning Wars

Sometimes I feel like I have very heterodox views on education because I look at two people making two arguments that are supposedly opposed to each other and feel like they’re both right. I’ve already discussed a back and forth between liberal writers at The Argument and idiosyncratic leftist, Freddie deBoer with regard to The Mississippi Miracle. Well, they’re still going, but are now discussing the UCSD math remediation/grade inflation… kerfuffle? Scandal? I don’t know what to call it at this point. You can read Kelsey Piper’s, let’s say frustrated, overview or take a look at Freddie’s most recent somewhat tangential riposte. The core of the disagreement, though, seems to be different levels of concern for absolute vs relative learning and the implications of that concern for education policy. To some extent, though, I think both perspectives are correct and both miss important aspects of problems facing schools and our education system writ-large. Here’s my summary.

The liberal perspective, embodied at the moment in Kelsey’s writing at The Argument, is absolutely correct to point out that absolute learning is an important and worthwhile policy goal. We can and should expect most children to achieve basic literacy and numeracy and when large swathes of students aren’t meeting those expectations, school policy should be changed to better support that outcome. The UCSD math remediation is a great example of this whole worldview. Kids who are ostensibly at the top of the ability distribution lack crucial math skills, requiring remediation and that simply shouldn’t be the case. Moreover, they should not be receiving high marks, As, in Advanced Placement courses when they can’t do basic algebra or, in some cases, work with fractions. It’s silly to say, as Freddie does, that students admitted to a leading university like UCSD, will always have some kids in the bottom of the ability distribution.

At the same time, Freddie is also totally correct on a few fronts. It really is incongruous to have an education system that insists every kid is capable of the exact same levels of achievement while also hierarchically sorting those students by ability so that they slot into the “right” college and career for their ability band. Asking schools to do both is asking schools to be at war with themselves and is the root of a lot of the destructive accountability policies of the last 25 years. He also makes what I think is a good structural critique of life outcomes. No matter how much absolute learning happens, the kids on the bottom of the ability distribution will have worse lives than the kids on top. I made a similar point on Wednesday about the outcomes for people who don’t go to college. As much as I agree that absolute learning matters and that it is in and of itself a good thing to raise levels of absolute learning, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that will lead to some kind of world where the lowest performers will live lives of leisure and luxury. We should temper our expectations of what schools can, on their own, accomplish. One challenge for the liberal perspective that I’m placing on The Argument and on Kelsey Piper, is that they really do seem to advocate for the same failed policies that animated NCLB and RTTT and Common Core. These policies are not just unsuccessful, they’re unpopular!

The truth is, of course, that both perspectives are important for policymakers, school leaders, and even teachers to consider. We need to recognize that it’s important for all kids to learn to read and write and do algebra and have some knowledge of history and scientific principles while also recognizing that this isn’t going to miraculously lead us to some utopia where everyone becomes a software engineer or corporate lawyer if only we hold them accountable in the right way. We need high levels of absolute learning and a social safety net that saves people from precarity and ruin. Schools aren’t that safety net. At least not all on their own, they aren’t. What’s more, and why I’m calling this the Left vs Liberal Learning Wars is because this conversation is only happening between the left and liberals. Conservatives and the right wing movement that controls the levers of power in the federal government and in many states are utterly disinterested in this conversation. They do not care about levels of absolute learning, exempt taxpayer funded voucher programs from all accountability, and they would rather bend the curve of life outcomes around something other than ability: race, religion, wealth, etc.

What Went Wrong?

A point that needs to be hammered again and again is how ineffective the last generation’s school reforms actually were. While I have been primarily highlighting test data, policies, and policy oriented writing, it’s always good to check in with teachers and learn from their experiences on the receiving end of these reforms. Here’s Peter Shull’s What Went Wrong?

Which is all to say, standardization is a terrible ‘good’ to aspire to. By its nature, standardization is reductive. In practice, it stops teachers from playing to their strengths, stops them from responding in unique ways to the unique compositions of their classrooms, and prevents teachers from cultivating environments that are genuine and authentic in which students, many of whom get too little interaction with responsible, caring adults to begin with, get to interact authentically with adults who have their best interests at heart. In education, standardization too often narrows students’ horizons at a time in life when those horizons should be stretched out. Too often, it means that teachers reduce the challenges we offer students to the ‘safe’ space of what we know they can accomplish instead of sailing with them to the more challenging waters in which some of them might not be successful. If the NCLB movement did us the favor of helping identify which students were being underserved, that favor has been done, and the subsequent repercussions of the standardized testing and ‘mastery’ movements have largely been negative.

Do read it all!

Curriculum Choices in Georgia

My home state is one of many that passed laws requiring evidence backed curricula. In doing so they empowered a board of various officials and educators to review and recommend various elementary reading curricula for districts to purchase. Curriculum Insights explains that something funny is going on.

The “strongly recommended” options were basals from big publishers that fell short on text quality/complexity and knowledge-building. Strangely, EL Education was the only program to receive all-green evaluations but no “Strongly Recommend.” (EL Education was developed by a nonprofit and it’s distributed by another nonprofit, Open Up Resources. Neither has the resources to send lobbyists to state houses, which might be the culprit.)

Georgia offers a critical lesson to the field: When state lists are a mixed bag, districts pick the weaker stuff.

Let’s all remember this in a few years so that when it is time to blame teachers and schools for sub-par 4th grade NAEP reading scores. When we see calls for accountability, who is holding the state-level and district-level actors available. If we’re really going to live in a world of top-down curriculum delivered with fidelity, shouldn’t the accountability measures fall on the curriculum developers and district officials who make the purchasing decisions? The more we curtail teacher professionalism and agency, the more we want to blame them for someone else’s failures.

Dual Enrollment Shows The Way

I was not surprised to learn that somewhere around a fifth of community college enrollees are current high school students taking dual enrollment courses but for some this is a shock. Kathleen Delaski’s writing feels a bit right-coded so you have to filter her perspective with those biases in mind, but I think she’s making a good point when she says,

What we see organically happening now is families asking for a blended approach between high school and college. That 1 out of 5 community college students is, today, a high schooler, the way this has caught us by surprise, is proof that families are voting with their feet. It’s time to design toward a less binary, flexible and visible learner journey.

Emphasis added. I write recently about how people want schools to offer them choices and that classic comprehensive high schools are the path to offering more choices. I suppose I could add flexible access to community college enrollment to that list. I also thought this part of the post was interesting:

f students have that kind of time available in their high school schedules, why are we letting them start college when K-12 math and reading scores are so abysmal? Isn’t there more basic work to be done on the home front? At first, dual enrollment was mainly attracting advanced, bored students.

One leans in: Woah, this could be the beginning of something really transformative. What if more students could take advantage? I learned in my book research that the programs only become diverse when funding and transportation are provided. The Community College Research Center has broken down the demographics and found that the clearest benefits in early research seem to be helping a higher percent of students of color finish college within four years, but as Jessica Lauritsen from the Education Design Lab told me, “what we learned from our work is that students don’t often feel like it’s an option for them, because no one ever talked to them about it. There’s no access. They don’t understand it. Families don’t understand it.”

A number of districts and states are waking up to the unintended consequences of who gets to benefit. Students whose parents are not working every angle, students who might be on what we are now calling a “professional track,” going to straight to employment after high school, would arguably benefit from getting college courses, particularly training for high demand, high wage jobs, under their belt by 12th grade. I remember a rural college leader telling me, “We push dual enrollment because this is the only college many of our students are going to get.”

It’s interesting to consider this discussion in light of the UCSD scandal. One approach is innovative and flexible and responsive to what families want while the other is stuck in an argument over last generation’s failed education reforms.

Too Young for Gifted Testing?

“There is no way to take prior experience out of a test,” she said. “I wish we could.” Children who’ve had more exposure to tests, problem-solving and patterns are still going to have an advantage on a nonverbal test, McCoach added.

And no test can overcome the fact that for very young children, scores can change significantly from year to year, or even week to week. In 2024, researchers analyzed more than 200 studies on the stability of cognitive abilities at different ages. They found that for 4-year-olds, cognitive test scores are not very predictive of long-term scores — or even, necessarily, short-term ones.

There’s not enough stability “to say that if we assess someone at age 4, 5, 6 or 7 that a child would or wouldn’t be well-served by being in a gifted program” for multiple years, said Moritz Breit, the lead author of the study and a post-doctoral researcher in the psychology department at the University of Trier in Germany.

Scores don’t start to become very consistent until later in elementary school, with stability peaking in late adolescence.

But for 4-year-olds? “Stability is too low for high-stakes decisions,” he said.

No one denies that access to gifted programming has been transformative for countless children. McCoach, the Fordham professor, points out that there should be something more challenging for the children who arrive at kindergarten already reading and doing arithmetic, who can be bored moving at the regular pace.

In an ideal world, experts say, there would be universal screening for giftedness (which some districts, but not New York, have embraced), using multiple measures in a thoughtful way, and there would be frequent entry — and exit — points for the programs. In the early elementary years, that would look less like separate gifted programming and a lot more like meeting every kid where they are.

“The question shouldn’t really be: Are you the ‘Big G’?” said McCoach. “That sounds so permanent and stable. The question should be: Who are the kids who need something more than what we are providing in the curriculum?”

Sounds familiar!

Thanks for reading!