Links and Commentary 7/11/25

Male Education and Fertility, Who Impoundment Hurts, Politicizing the Texas Floods, Students want to be Taken Seriously as Thinkers, Ways of Knowing

Author

James Shanahan
July 11, 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.

Male Educational Attainment vs Fertility

Back in January, when my links were simply appended the weekly post, I pointed out that I was hesitant to weigh in on the discourse about falling educational achievement among men. While there is a lot of evidence that boys are, on average, underperforming girls when compared with their past levels of achievement, I was still unsure about the implications of everything being discussed. It seemed like there was an ugly and less rigorous side to the discussion that simply wanted women out of schools.

One question I have is more about whether the “problem” is a manifestation of equalizing opportunities for girls in school? We’re all for meritocracy until the girls start taking all the jobs? DEI for boys? Is that where this is going? Like I said, I’m hesitant to jump in until I feel like there are more concrete answers out there.

I came across a discussion this week of birth rates and female educational achievement that raised some red flags. Someone on Twitter shared a graph they created that seemed not to be on the up-and-up.

Source

The clear implication of the post, of course, is that you increase birthrates by reducing female education. But it’s also bad data science:

But that kind of data hides some pretty big problems. What you’re seeing in Roko’s graph is driven by at least two trends. One is the differences in education between countries. The other is the temporal effect—since 1960, birth rates have gone down and education has increased. It creates a sort of “temporal smearing” effect.

This is a problem because if two variables are changing over time in a simple, uniform way, the “smearing” effect will occur regardless of whether they are actually related, and it will make the final relationship in a graph like Roko’s look stronger than it actually is.

Horton and another commentator, Nicholas Kirchner, produced a few graphs to make the point that this kind of shoddy data could just as easily show a false relationship between men’s educational attainment and fertility. If you look at the color coding they’ve added visualizes that “smearing effect”.

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Given that men are seeing declining educational attainment, we should expect birth rates to go up any day now, right? What I think is happening is that online discourse about men is being warped by bad-faith actors who want to push a narrative that men’s problems are women’s fault. Whether it’s jobs or education or fertility, women are to blame. It also means it’s really hard to have a data-driven and objective discussion about what’s going on with the boys.

Here are two articles that take a different angle to the whole thing. Cathy Reisenwitz discusses some of the common claims made about boy’s performance in modern society.

The canard that boys do worse in school because schools are biased against them is blatantly false. I’m not sure whether the people saying it actually hate boys and men. But they’re definitely screwing them over by blaming something that’s not happening and ignoring the actual sources of the disparity. Once again, sexism serves the status quo, so powerful people have an incentive to protect it. It’s sad how consistently conservatives love their self-serving definition of masculinity even, and especially, when it actively and measurably harms vulnerable men.

Celeste Davis looks at male enrollment in higher education. She argues that some men simply will not participate in environments that are female dominated, including higher education, which is about 60% female now. She shares the work of sociologist Anne Lincoln:

A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.

But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”

Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.

“There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what's really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” - Dr. Anne Lincoln

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!

I really think that when we ask, what’s going on with the boys? that the discussion should be less focused on manipulating the environments to be more conducive to what society thinks boys ought to want. Instead, I think there needs to be continued sociological and psychological investigation of why boys don’t want to be in female dominated environment. Put another way, instead of seeing boys as the victims of a female dominated society which forces them out (LOL have you seen the world? this is such a crazy claim anyways) we should be figuring out why boys are choosing not to be a part of society. The solution can’t be to remove women when the problem is located in the men.

Who Gets Hurt by Funding Impoundment?

The loss of funding can be computed two ways--either by total funding lost to a school district or the per-pupil funding lost. Stadler and Abbott rank the top 100 districts each way.

The largest loss of funding by district includes Clark County Schools in Nevada ($21.9 million), Philadelphia schools ($21.6 million), Broward County Schools in Florida ($20.5 million), and Kanawha County School District in West Virginia ($19.3 million). Worked out by lost per-pupil dollars, the top districts include Cleveland Elementary School District of Montana ($6,000), Kester Elementary School District of Montana ($5,000), and Boles Independent School District of Texas ($2,512).

Stadler and Abbott also break down the funding loss by congressional district. The greatest loss in is California’s D-15, represented by Democrat Kevin Mullin ($12.2 million). The second greatest loss is in the Louisiana district of House Speaker Mike Johnson; schools in his district will lose $12.2 million. Representatives Richard Hudson, Robert Scott and Nancy Mace will all see funding losses of over $12 million in their districts.

Stadler and Abbott found that school districts represented by Republicans will lose more per-pupil funding that those represented by Democrats.

I’d argue there is a third way to look at the funding cuts, and that’s to ask which kids are impacted by their programs getting budgets slashed.

The withheld funds, which were approved by Congress earlier this year, include all $890 million meant to help English learners develop their language skills and $375 million to provide academic support to the children of migrant farmworkers, according to an email that was sent to states by the U.S. Department of Education and obtained by Education Week.

The money being held back also includes $2.2 billion in Title II funds that support teacher training, $1.4 billion for before- and after-school programs, and $1.3 billion in funding for academic enrichment programs, such as STEM and college and career counseling.

It’s the non-white kids! It’s the poor kids! Most kids in the US needing to learn English are not white. The children of migrant farm workers are largely Hispanic from Mexico and Central America. The kids who use the after school program being cut: from poor families who need somewhere safe and productive for them to be instead of unsupervised on the streets: “the federal dollars for after-school and summer-school programs — about $1.3 billion annually — support 1.4 million students, mostly lower income, representing about 20 percent of all students in after-school programs nationally.” Guess what kind of teacher training got defunded? “Many school districts also rely on federal dollars to help non-English-speaking students and families, including training teachers and hiring translators.”

These are cuts targeted at poor minority youth. The purpose is to deprive them of an education, of support so their families can work, and of opportunities to get gainful employment. Moreover, after school programs are often something of a safe space for undocumented kids because ICE can’t enter schools. Now, those kids will be somewhere more readily accessible for deportation (or worse?).

Politicizing the Texas Floods

Paul Krugman says we should politicize the floods leaders need to be held accountable for the decisions that they made that have made this disaster worse than it had to be. He’s making a more general point about funding cuts at the federal level and how that undermines state capacity to warn about and intervene in emergencies. I want to make a more direct point about the behavior of elected officials in Kerr County, Texas.

A few years ago, the county had asked the state of Texas for $1 million to build a storm warning system.

Kerr County, part of a region whose rivers and creeks have high flooding potential, earned the nickname “Flash Flood Alley” and was among the communities that sought preventative funding. It asked for $1 million to build a flood warning system that would have upgraded 20 water gauge systems, added new water level sensors and posts, and created software and a website to distribute the information to the public in real-time.

Texas said no and the county was unable to make any upgrades.

Then, in 2021 they had the opportunity to spend some of the $10.2 million dollars the county received from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on flood mitigation and warning systems. In the county’s presentation to the public, they even included infrastructure investment in “water upgrades” and “stormwater infrastructure”.

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Officials at the local and the state level had the chance to upgrade their flood warning systems and conduct some flood mitigation efforts. They chose a different path despite a long history of knowing they needed these updates and even requesting funds to do so.

The ones who’ve made the flood political are the politicians who had the power to do otherwise. The people of Kerr County deserve better and refusing to talk about accountability means the elected officials who failed to protect their people won’t be tossed out of office.

Students want to be Taken Seriously as Thinkers

Frank Strong of the Anger and Clarity Substack interviews Annie Abrams about her book, Short Changed: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students. It’s definitely one I’ll be picking up. I never taught AP because my focus was always on the bottom part of the achievement distribution, so I was especially interested to hear that AP essays have changed dramatically since I was taking AP exams as a student two decades ago.

And the tests themselves are much flatter. Even if you look at exams from twenty or thirty years ago, they’re different now. The rubrics have changed. Here’s an example: the AP English writing rubrics used to be holistic, less than ten years ago. Now there are check-boxes for elements of an essay. And you don’t even have to really write a complete essay to check all the boxes. And think that surprises a lot of parents. It surprised my students this year when they saw the AP Language rubric. And I think it surprises a lot parents, too, who remember something different.

Abrams’ story isn’t all doom and gloom, though. She sees some bright spots emerging in her students’ discovery of liking reading books.

I’ve been having this wild experience this year, and it’s sort of new to me, honestly, where students are really into books. I mean, it has always been the case that a handful are sort of zealots. But this year, it’s wider spread. Students want to read books. There’s an appetite for it and we’re failing to meet it. I don’t know why.

She connects that to their writing and offers what I think might be one of the most important things teachers everywhere should remember:

I guess you could cut all of what came before this and just start here: Students want to be taken seriously as thinkers, and we should do that. We should take them seriously and help them to take themselves seriously too, right? It's part of what gives them agency.

I hope to find more writing or interviews with Abrams because these are the kinds of sentiments we need to hear right now.

Ways of Knowing

Jamie House shares an insight he developed while listening to a talk by John Vervaeke. AI, he says, is only capable of propositional knowledge.

When you ask it something, or prompt it to provide an answer, it's able to come back to you with the information that is available to it, and what you are looking for. These are static descriptions or generally accepted value-judgments about the world. They sit in the form of propositional statements or declarative sentences.

Examples:

  • Knowing that Ottawa is the capital of Canada.

  • Knowing that cats and dogs rarely get along.

  • Knowing that AI is disrupting education

  • Knowing that squares have 4 equal sides and four ninety degree angles.

What AI cannot do, and may never be able to do, is develop the three other kinds of knowledge: procedural knowledge, perspectival knowledge, and participatory knowledge. He links a video of John’s talk and I agree that it is worth teachers’ time.

Thanks for reading!