Links and Commentary 2/6/26

I'm Right about Resistance, Effects of ICE Raids, In Utero Noise Pollution, Epistemology in Education, It's Scholastic Alchemy

Author

James Shanahan
February 06, 2026

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!

I’m Right about Resistance

Last week I pointed out that public schools are not a site of resistance. In my head, I was responding to lots of online chatter about teachers needing to speak up and actively oppose the regime’s draconian immigration enforcement. The overall sentiment was that if you, as a teacher, were not vocally opposing ICE or Trump in your classroom then you were doing your students a disservice. While I am no fan of Trump and despise ICE’s reign of terror, I felt this was shortsighted. Teachers work for state governments and as such are subject to a variety of rules. Because they work for the state and are charged with the care of children, teachers do not have unlimited free speech. I think this fact escapes educators who work in states with strong teacher unions because those unions will fight to protect teachers’ political expression. There are teachers in red states who will face reprisals for speaking out against lawless masked thugs snatching minorities off the street at the behest of Dear Leader. We should filter our expectations of their conduct though the kind of sacrifice we are asking them to make. A teacher in Illinois may think it costs nothing to say “Fuck ICE” in front of a class of students but that’s only because his job is protected by a strong union that will back him against the state. This is not the case in, say, my home state of Georgia. I closed with a prediction:

Schools are going to be enlisted in support of the administration’s crackdown in one way or another. They are going to be enlisted to stifle student and teacher speech.

The Texas Education Agency on Tuesday warned school districts that they could be taken over by the state if they help facilitate students walking out of class to attend protests.

The agency released guidance after Gov. Greg Abbott directed Education Commissioner Mike Morath to investigate a social media post showing Austin Independent School District students participating in nationwide walkouts against the recent killings of several people by federal immigration officers. Austin school district police officers drove near some of the students during the Jan. 30 protest in downtown Austin.

In the guidance released Tuesday evening, the education agency said students, teachers or school districts participating in “inappropriate political activism” could face the following consequences:

1. Students being marked absent and districts losing state funding.

2. Educators being investigated and disciplined, including losing their teaching license.

3. Districts facing state oversight, including the replacement of an elected school board with a board of managers.

There you go. This is where resistance in schools leads us in red states and is exactly why I think calls for all teachers to speak out against the regime are not helpful, even if well intentioned. The students and faculty of Austin’s schools are now looking at punishment, both individual and collective, for some students violating the state ideology of Texas. Schools are now being coerced into towing the line: that ICE is legitimate law enforcement, that schools should discourage speaking out against the regime, and that liberal politics should be kept out of the classroom. Conservative agendas, like Christianizing schools, on the other hand, are being required by law.

Effects of ICE Raids

I’ve linked information in the past about how ICE raids have negative impacts on both children who are targeted and on their acquaintances. This week, Hechinger Reports adds some data to the mix with looking at what exactly those negative impacts are.

Beltrán-Grimm’s initial findings from the pilot study, which is expanding this year to nearly 500 additional families, add to a growing body of research tracking the effects of aggressive immigration enforcement on the mental health of young children. Experts say such policies, like those that have been playing out across the country since President Donald Trump took office last year, are felt not only by immigrant children, but also by children whose families are not at risk of deportation.

Research shows children can display troubling behaviors when their communities are targeted by immigration enforcement, including increased aggression, separation anxiety and withdrawal.

Parents and early educators have long reported increased aggression, separation anxiety and withdrawal among children when administrations ramp up immigration enforcement, with worse effects for those who fear enforcement.

If that anxiety is left unaddressed, there can be long-term consequences. Exposure to immigration enforcement in childhood has been found to lead to long-term anxiety, PTSD and depression in adolescence and young adulthood. Young children are especially vulnerable to trauma because their brains are rapidly developing during the first five years of life, and that development can be highly influenced by stress hormones.

Schools are going to be dealing with the fallout of the regime’s illegal thuggery for a long time. Terrorizing families and communities has only costs and those are felt most acutely by those most closely embedded in the communities: Churches, schools, social workers, and local law enforcement. Where will we lay the blame for these traumas? Will we remember the kids who were disappeared by our government, or will we simply record absences and dropouts and then scold the schools for declining attendance and increased dropouts? Do we remember how many children witnessed their friends’ families being dragged away by masked gunmen when they take the NAEP? When symbolically opposing the regime means whole school districts are taken over by the state, teachers fired, funding slashed, and kids subjected to discipline, what impact do we expect that to have on learning?

Nah, it’s fine. I’m sure Matt Yglesias or whoever will have an essay in a few years about low test scores in Minneapolis are the result of a lack of “accountability.”

In Utero Noise Pollution

One of the reasons I’m so hard on standardization efforts is that they tend to assume that all kids are capable of all things, as though this cruel world of ours doesn’t deal some people a bad hand before they even have a chance to begin playing. Like, if you look at that paragraph above, I’m trying to point out that laser-focus on test scores and academic interventions misses what’s happening to kids socially and psychologically. ICE raids may turn out to have a huge cost in terms of educational achievement but I’m not sure our systems of school accountability and quality assurance are set up to acknowledge that trauma exists and harms children. In fact, there are many things that could damage a child’s ability to succeed educationally that are totally outside of the control of schools. For example, noise pollution children experience before they’re even born.

From the abstract:

In utero noise pollution exposure harms health at birth. A 2 decibel increase in average noise levels during pregnancy—a small but perceptible increase—lowers an overall index measure of infant health by 4 percent of a standard deviation, equivalent to one-third of the Black-White gap in the index. This effect is driven by nighttime noise, suggesting disruptions to maternal sleep as a main mechanism.

Eighty percent of urban residents are exposed to potentially harmful levels of nighttime noise. I estimate that the cost of noise pollution due to harms to health at birth is $8.4 billion per year. Urban, Black, and Hispanic Americans disproportionately bear these costs.

Now, the paper does not go into schooling outcomes, but it seems reasonable to expect that some large portion of poor infant health outcomes also have implications for their academic performance once they reach school age. I’d like to see this more clearly broken down and with measures that give us more detail than simply looking at educational attainment. That would let us know more about how in utero developmental problems show up in school data.

Epistemology in Education

I was recommended an interesting essay this week about how differences in epistemology — the philosophical view of what it means to know something — account for many of the challenges in education. As the author, Rod Naquin, puts it

In the world of education, various stakeholders—including veteran teachers, ambitious reformers, and data-driven researchers—rarely share the same epistemic starting point. A researcher might “know” a literacy strategy is effective because of a rigorous, randomized controlled trial involving thousands of students. Meanwhile, a teacher in the classroom “knows” that same strategy won’t work for their specific students based on fifteen years of daily observation and professional intuition. Because we rarely name these different “ways of knowing,” we end up treating deep philosophical disagreements as mere personality clashes or stubborn resistance to change.

I like this framing for two reasons. One is that I basically agree with the gist of Naquin’s point. I mean, look at what I’ve written so far today. I’m constantly making the point that our schools’ systems of accountability are unable to see some meaningful variables that impact their core measures: tests, attendance, graduation rates, and discipline. This is an epistemological blind spot that I harp on again and again because it’s not exactly unpredictable but reformers seem to design systems with these blind spots anyway. Naquin recommends epistemic humility for the change makers.

The most significant implication for education leaders is the urgent need for “epistemic humility.” Reformers and instructional leaders must stop assuming that “the data” is a neutral, objective force that everyone should naturally obey. Instead, they should treat a school’s culture as a “web of beliefs.” When introducing a new practice, the first and most important question shouldn’t be “How do we implement this?” but rather, “How does this new idea fit—or clash—with how our teachers currently understand the act of teaching and learning?”

While I agree this is a good path forward, I’m not so sure reformers and leaders are interested in any kind of humility. If that was the case, you’d think they would even try getting the bare facts right. Instead, we have lots of people interested in ignoring recent history and re-writing it to fit their preferred agenda.

It’s Scholastic Alchemy

Every once and a while it’s worth remembering why I write this blog/newsletter/thing. Education often appears to be a field where reforms go to die. I don’t think that’s entirely true, but education reforms do often fail (perhaps because reformers lack epistemic humility, ha!). When reforms fail, we often ask how we could have ever thought the reform was a good idea in the first place. After the fact, reforms appear to be obviously flawed but the trick is recognizing problems in real time. We’re sort of at that point with the Science of Reading, where a good reform agenda has been alchemically transmuted into something other than the educational gold it was supposed to be. Every so often, we get a window into exactly how this process happens. It’s not the same with every reform, so don’t take this as some kind of predictable diagnosis to be solved, but it is the case that advocates for Science of Reading have overcommitted to the concept and brought in a bunch of non-scientific bunk that is proving counterproductive to their mission.

The Science of Reading era represented a welcome backlash against phonics-lite curricula and the harms of cueing.

Yet corrections have a way of turning into overcorrections. A “more is always better” mindset flourished, and theories about oral-only phonemic awareness became fashionable, in spite of all those studies listed above.

Researcher David Kilpatrick, editor of the Reading League journal, boosted the concept, as did the popular LETRS training. Teaching guides by Kilpatrick and Louisa Moats endorsed oral-only PA1 for struggling readers.

A company called Heggerty offered an oral-only PA curriculum, and it quickly blew up in schools. Heggerty was easy to use, and asked only 10-15 minutes per day. It felt science-y and phonics-y. Plus LETRS trainers promoted Heggerty by name. And who would question David Kilpatrick and Louisa Moats about their ideas? Certainly not the hundreds of thousands of teachers flocking to Facebook groups to improve their teaching.

By 2022, Heggerty claimed to be in 70% of US districts. In Ohio, Heggerty was the most-used curriculum, with 50% market share. In fact, I don’t know of any single curriculum with its market penetration, in any subject area.

So much for blaming everything on Lucy Calkins! Heggerty has more reach than her Units of Study ever did and they gained that market share in just a few years as opposed the two decades that comprised UoS’s rise and fall. In both cases, however, I find one similarity. For Calkins, the big boost in curriculum adoption happened because of two political changes: her friend becoming chancellor of NYC’s schools and the subsequent adoption of Common Core. Her curriculum, basically written in alignment with Common Core from the beginning of its draft standards, was one of the first to market able to meet the needs of this newly legislated set of standards. In the case of Hegerty, they were in that position as states began mandating phonics-based literacy curricula. We make a law, they were ready with a curriculum designed to meet the legal requirements, and districts bought it in droves. When we change the laws to, I dunno, require knowledge-based curriculums, who will be the next Units of Study or Heggerty?

Thanks for reading!