Links and Commentary 4/4/25

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.

On a slightly personal note, I’ve been playing with the timing of the posts a little bit. It’s not so much that I’m looking at the metrics — I write for myself and am content to hope someone else finds it interesting — but that I’m trying to make sure I have time to make a halfway decent post that does what I want it to do. One thing you should know about me is that I function best when I have a stable routine. I am the kind of person who wants to do the same thing at the same time every day, day after day. If, for example, I do not walk the dog first thing in the morning and instead spend that time getting food ready or taking care of the baby, then when I do walk the dog, chances are I forget my keys or don’t check if I need to refill the poop bags. Something similar happens with my writing. If my schedule is disrupted, I find I have a hard time organizing my thoughts effectively. Sometimes I will simply forget to do my Monday writing if my Monday is somehow different from usual. Anyway, this is all to say that I’m scheduling the posts to go out later because I am finding that I increasingly face disruptions to my schedule. If you liked getting them at 6am on Wednesdays and Fridays, apologies. That is my preferred setup too, but I can’t maintain it if I don’t have time to write the posts on Monday or Tuesday and must instead write it Wednesday morning.

Sometimes I am right

In March I made the point that I did not believe that the Trump administration would actually shut down the Department of Education.

This line of thinking just makes sense to me. Let’s say you’re a devoted evangelical christian and you believe that all public schools should have prayer in school, display the ten commandments, and follow an abstinence only sexual education curriculum. Maybe you feel that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs are contrary to your christian beliefs and promote a Marxist-atheist worldview. Your state of, let’s say, Louisiana already does most of this but you’re not happy because a liberal state like Illinois or New York will not adopt those rules. Vouchers aren’t enough! Not every kid will attend a properly christianized school. Millions of children are being educated under a regime that you think is going to morally ruin those kids. You would prefer that the federal government enact some kind of policy to get those states to go along with your preferred vision of what education should look like. This might mean that you actually want the Department of Education to exist and to promote those policies.

Anyway,

Seems like I’m right about this one. Although the president’s rhetoric is all about closing down the Department of Education, I think there is a large enough group of religious and ideological conservatives supporting the president that he will allow them the chance to use the DOE to force blue states to adopt their preferred policies. The agency, stripped of most other functions, exists now to implement an agenda. What that fully entails remains to be seen but I’m confident that we won’t see the agency fully dissolved.

Things that work are complex

One of the things I hate hearing when talking about education is a sentence that starts with the phrase “Why can’t schools just …” because it is invariably followed by whatever one neat trick the speaker thinks will “fix” schools. Half the time their suggestion is something that schools already do. The other half of the time, it’s just naive to assume that one change will make a meaningful improvement in all schools everywhere. In recent years, there’s been a lot of attention given to phonics education. Rightly so! But as we’ve seen with reading scores, the improvements are only good to a point. Literacy is complex and while proper foundational literacy education is absolutely a requirement, it is simply not sufficient to turn around reading scores for the whole country.

I often think about literacy and if you’re connected in any way to literacy education then you’ve encountered Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story podcast. It is absolutely worth a listen in its entirety. It is probably the single most influential piece of educational journalism in the last 30 years. Her work has quite literally been the reason many states have changed their reading laws and why many districts have adopted more explicit phonics in their elementary curricula. Her work has also been, I think, a bit oversimplified. She does a great job of setting up the context under which balanced literacy programs (I have some quibbles with the definition here but that’s the topic of a longer post I need to write) became the dominant literacy paradigm. Sadly, many listeners forget that part and jump to “schools did things wrong” without understanding the contingencies that got us there.

Most recently, Hanford has promoted Steubenville, Ohio’s schools as an example of what works.

Here’s the list of things they do:

• Subsidize pre-k starting at age 3 for every kid in the district.

• Attendance support, including contests and prizes for the kids.

• Reduced class sizes with some reading classes having as few as six students.

• Built-in time to practice new skills with peers, away from classroom instruction.

• Tutored kids identified as needing help.

• Maintained a consistent reading program that, yes, includes structured explicit phonics instruction.

Beyond that list, the article includes this image:

So, you can infer that they also provide a host of poverty alleviation measures, such as feeding and clothing kids.

Do you know what gets all the attention?

The emphasis is mine. I have lamented in the past that we, as a society, are far too focused on the academic side of schooling. Even in this situation, Hanford’s reporting identifies a variety of non-academic measures that people ignore. Feeding hungry kids and clothing kids too poor to afford proper clothes will help those kids do better in school, yet we pretend like the only important lesson is teaching phonics and intensely focusing on learning.

Successes in schools are often the result of what we see in Steubenville. The schools there approach their problems holistically, changing everything from schedules to class size to running a food bank and clothing give-away. They recognize that, in order to learn effectively and achieve that intense focus on academics, they have to support the entire school community. This takes time and money and resources and training and buy-in. None of that is something that comes at the end of “Why can’t schools just…”. Things that work are complex.

Speaking of schools and Ohio, the Ohio GOP wants to cut school funding. Cuts implemented by republicans at the federal level are also going to directly impact poor schools in Ohio. Steubenville, being a very poor district, is likely set to take the brunt of these cuts. Let me try my hand at this: Why can’t we just fully fund our schools?

More Ivies Targeted

The Trump administration is blocking $510 million in grants to Brown University. Echoing the press release about Title 1 funds, our national school leader said,

Meanwhile $9 billion in grants to Harvard are being blocked pending ideological review. I wouldn’t expect these attacks to slow down, even once all the Ivy League schools are gutted. Higher education is a big juicy target and they’re not going to look away anytime soon.

It’s important to remember what we get for our money and what may be lost when these cuts are made.

Reading Research Guidance

One thing you get used to being a researcher is comprehending research but it’s often very hard to translate that research into your practice as an educator. The Right to Read Project has put out a great little guide for teachers and administrators trying to sus out the latest reading research. For example, they put out a useful terminology sheet to help parse some of the language you may encounter in research.

This is also a great chance for me to remind everyone that the What Works Clearinghouse exists (for now) and publishes great research guides as well as making available much of the original research the guides are drawing on.

Need to “do something”? Start a study group

I’ve never been part of a successful book club so it may seem odd that I am essentially recommending starting one. Sure, study group is something of a larger conversation and doesn’t have to focus exclusively on books, but I think that reading books remains an important component. Part of my purpose in writing this Substack/Beehiiv/Newsletter/Blog/Thing is that I am trying to explain and explore interesting education related topics while also making a few key observations along the way. You could think of this as something of a one-way study group (unless we actually set one up, which could be cool). The larger point today, though, is that sometimes it helps to have a community of people all thinking and talking about the same things. This can be especially true during times of uncertainty when it’s not clear what anyone can do about anything. Me, I write. You may find another avenue, such as a study group, to be effective.

Laundering my guilt

To return to a personal note, one thing I frequently worry about is whether I’d be happier in a K-12 classroom as a teacher. I loved the teaching side of higher ed and have always found relationships with students to be the most rewarding part of being in education. There’s also something to be said about someone purporting to explain schools who isn’t working daily in a school. I mention all this because my local school district is set to hire somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000 teachers. Interestingly,

Maybe I’m just out here on the internet laundering my guilt about not being a classroom teacher? I’ll have to think on it.

Thanks for reading!