Links and Commentary 12/12/25

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!

Programming Note: Hanging with family today so I won’t be adding my usual 500 words of commentary with each link. Just quick paragraphs today.

AI Wrecking Research?

The extremely rapid proliferation of AI in academic publishing is creating a surge of AI written papers. What’s worse, those papers fabricate citations. Those fabricated citations are then picked up by the neat little AI summaries in your search engines (or when you directly ask AI about that topic) effectively legitimizing fake citations and fake research. This is also adding a ton of work for anyone trying to build out reviews of research or collecting records. Scientific American covers the problem here but this TikTok from someone who researches AI gives a nice synopsis.

@professorcasey

AI fabricated citations in a published scientific article? Maybe. But also just a broader cautionary tale about information disorder in sc... See more

AI Literacy in Finland and the UK

New Humanist, a publication I am not familiar with, has an article calling for more AI literacy instruction in schools. They compare what’s happening in Finland with England, Scotland, and Wales. In general, I respond to ideas like these with either “we already do media literacy in English and History class and statistical thinking in Math class” or “what should we remove from the curriculum to make space for more AI literacy.” That said, I think it’s still worth a read to get a sense of what people outside the US are worried about when it comes to AI in school and society.

Reforms On Repeat

I am planning to write more about this Atlantic article form Jonathan Chait for next Wednesday’s post but stop me if you’ve heard this one before: democrats and teachers unions decided they didn’t like testing so they got rid of all the accountability measures republicans put in place under NCLB. It’s a story we’ve heard again and again and it just doesn’t pass the reality check. Standardization is still here. Accountability is still here. It’s just here in a form that the Chaits of the world refuse to recognize. This is why their answer to literally every problem in education is the same no matter the specifics or the complexities. Just do more standardization, more testing, and more ranking and sorting of students. I have yet to see anyone from this camp provide an honest and accurate accounting of why these reforms failed. They are much happier to cast their usual political opponents, “the left,” as at fault.

Eyes on the Seats

It turns out, being an experienced educator means you’re more effective at visually scanning and locating trouble spots in your classroom than a novice. Now, you may be thinking “no shit” and wondering why anyone bothered studying this. I get it! But think about it this way: we need measurable, quantifiable, scientific information to help policymakers understand why teacher retention is important. It’s not a healthy thing for school systems to have tons of turnover and saps them of experienced educators. This, in turn, leads to poorer instruction and poorer outcomes. As the authors point out, teachers are experts and build expertise as they gain experience. We should treat them as experts!

Research vs Teaching in Higher Ed

Chad Orzel responds to something Matt Yglesias wrote this week on higher education — that is, college and university. Chad hits on what is one of my biggest gripes about academia (and is also a point Yglesias makes).

I think it’s especially galling to me because I am a teacher and then went to get a doctorate in education. What do you mean teaching is the least important part of my job? I’m teaching teachers! If anything, one of the greatest impacts we can have on K-12 schooling is our major role in preparing the majority of future K-12 educators and you tell me it’s not important to my career?

Anyway, read both posts. Chad goes on to make an important point that it’s not always a good idea to fully separate the teaching and research functions and that Matt is a bit off in his historical explanation of why so much university research is government funded. He offers a point I’ve not seen made very often and one that matches my own views: