Links and Commentary 3/28/25

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.

A New Elite Consensus?

I’ve written a bit about how the general consensus around education has been one based mostly on human capital theory. One natural outgrowth of this way of thinking is to want all young people in schools that prepare them with the skills and knowledge they will need to succeed in life. While I also pointed to some flaws in how this approach made people think about schools and the economy, it’s not a crazy set of beliefs. By and large, the consensus among most people was that schooling is a good thing for most people and a worthwhile goal for governments to pursue. That consensus seems to be somewhat coming apart. Ideological religious conservatives who never held the belief that education was meant to be broadly accessible are ascendant. Others may not hold those same ideological positions but still feel that devoting time and resources to average or below average students is unimportant. What really matters, we learn, is that the tools and techniques we use are going to help the top 10% of students.

It’s worth diving into what Chrisman Frank, one of the leaders behind the ed tech tool, Synthesis Tutor, is saying matters in education. "We're going to be totally fine if this thing helps the top 10% of kids more than it helps the bottom 10%. We don't really care.” He argues that the fewest resources are being devoted to the top 10% of students and that they deserve a greater piece of the pie. Now, this may be true if you look at, say, federal funding of education where a bunch of it is devoted to Title 1 schools, to the poor. It may also be true that a school built to serve all students does not devote the majority of its resources to only 10% of them. That was kind of the point, that helping all students achieve more meant devoting resources to better support the learning needs of students who were struggling. Are schools any good at this? The jury is out, is the most diplomatic answer. But what’s changed is that the leaders of our country, the leaders of our most dynamic and influential industries, and the leaders of some of our cultural institutions (churches) no longer care about most students. They only care about the ones they judge worthy of the time and effort to teach. That is a paradigm shift for all of education that I worry many don’t see coming.

In a little over a week, our nation’s scholastic leader and many of these tech luminaries will gather for the ASU+GSV conference. It is worth paying attention to the products and tools they promote, but more importantly, we need to listen to their ideas. I expect them to be a dramatic departure from the old consensus.

Detaining Foreign Students and Free Speech

A long time ago I tried to explain to people that the freedom of speech is kind of an illusion. It’s one that relies on the government remaining somewhat beneficent and on strong legal institutions to retaliate against overreaches. Recently, I think a lot of people have been coming around to that point of view. It may sound like a tautology, but free speech is only real so long as you’re actually allowed to speak freely. At the time, I was telling some classmates in graduate school that teachers do not have freedom of speech. Even things they say and do in their personal capacities can be grounds for termination if someone decides that that speech is detrimental to their jobs as educators. Since many educators are employed with morality clauses in their contracts, it’s relatively easy for schools to remove teachers for minor infractions. Indeed, there are supreme court cases that say, more or less, teachers’ speech in and out of school is subject to their capacities as educators. If a teacher’s speech is not of an educational nature, then it’s not protected.

The Trump administration is rounding up foreign students in the US and suspending their visas because they have posted content in support of Palestinians.

These aren’t just run-of-the-mill students either. Some are deep into prestigious research programs. One is a Fullbright Scholar. One is a doctor and kidney transplant specialist.

Here’s the thing. We think that the freedom of speech exists and that it is damned near absolute. Okay, we tell ourselves, maybe we can’t yell fire in a crowded theater but pretty much anything else goes. THAT’S NOT TRUE. These deportations are an important example because the administration is going to argue that foreign nationals in the US are subject to a different set of regulations on their speech than regular US citizens. They are going to argue that the terms of their visas restrict their speech. They are going to argue that their roles as researchers, doctors, college instructors, and so on entail limits to their freedom of speech. And then they are going to argue that US citizens who work as researchers, doctors, college instructors, etc. are also subject to those limits.

The Hits Keep Coming

I don’t have a lot of commentary for this one.

Remember what I said above? We are moving into a paradigm where education is not for everyone. We do not want every kid in the country to receive a decent education. That’s not our purpose anymore as a nation. Unless you’re somehow identified as one of the elect, you’re on your own.

EdSource Covers How Schools Changed Since Covid

We’re five years out since emergency remote instruction threw everything into chaos and sometimes it seems like the chaos hasn’t ended. I recommend this short EdSource piece on how California’s schools have changed. Here’s a snipped I thought was interesting given the crisis surrounding absenteeism:

Now, I generally think the chronically absent kids are going to be disproportionately poor kids, black and brown kids, but it’s interesting to see these ones somewhat coded as wealthy — going on vacation, working from home, rather than just absent. I wonder if there’s good data on this? Perhaps they manage to slide in just under the chronically absent mark and aren’t included in the data?

Just four for today. It’s been a busy week. Okay, fine, go read Matt Yglesias resent post about why democrats stopped talking about school reform. I don’t know that he really gets far enough into the “why” actually, but it’s a start.