Uncertainty Principles

Hello, this is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice weekly blog where I write about education topics that interest me. I will typically post a small selection of links and commentary each Monday and a long-form post later in the week. 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!

Remember One-to-One computers?

There’s an ongoing subplot in season 4 of the show Abbott Elementary about getting the school more EdTech, including laptops for the children, by extorting the developers of a nearby golf course. It’s a great show and one of the warmest depictions of educators and of schools ever, so please don’t think I’m bringing this up to slam the show. I watch Abbott and enjoy the show immensely. I also think that television and media do a lot to shape society’s idea of schooling and the motivations of people in schools. Usually what we get is stuff like season 4 of The Wire. Let’s just say that’s not the kindest representation of teachers and schools and it’s interesting that even twenty years later people look at that show as an accurate representation of living and working and teaching in Baltimore.

Perceptions of schools stick around and get repeated again and again. For example, that schools need money to get more classroom tech and that tech is automatically a good thing. Teachers will know how to use it effectively and there’s little risk of downsides. This was, like The Wire’s depiction of schooling in Baltimore, simply common sense. Everyone just knew it was true so when a writers room got together to think about what a poor urban school would want, they landed on technology.

The way we talk about school in our media, in the news, and in our fictional portrayals often feels sticky and it gives us a window into understanding just how big of a shift is underway in schools with regard to student-facing technology. After all, the season of Abbott where the teachers use golf course developer money to get more technology into the hands of students is only 2 years old. The first episode aired in October 2024 and the season ended in April 2025. Our collective cultural understand was so thoroughly pro-EdTech that we were imagining the thing poor elementary students needed most was one-to-one screens.

In the fall of 2026, if you’re thinking that it sounds insane to be making shows about giving each kid a laptop, then you probably need to think about how little you paid attention to the last twenty years of education discourse. You might also think about why you’re so certain it’s a bad idea.

Certainty is comfortable

Narratives derive from certainty. Authors craft narratives with many plot structures or character arcs or whatever elements of fiction you want to name, but there is always upon completion of the narrative a kind of certainty. There will be a beginning, middle, and end. We’ll have characters and events and the ways they respond to those events will or will not change the characters. If you teach middle-grades children about stories, one of the big things you have to do is stop them from inventing things that didn’t happen and get them to focus on the actual facts of the story because, while meaning may be flexible and interpretable, the characters and plot are not. They’re either in the story or they aren’t. The strength of close reading and the reason we teach it is to keep our focus on the certain aspects of the narrative so that the later more uncertain work about meaning can be done.

We create narratives in the real world, too. Humans are natural story tellers and we place certainty onto our uncertain world because it helps us to make sense of things. We tell a story about how all urban schools are bad and how all their teachers and administrators are corrupt or incompetent because it gives us certainty. We tell a story about technology that says it’s always beneficial and that every kid needs it in order to learn. These narrative certainties also create solutions. If we know tech is always good, we solve poor school performance by adding tech. If we know that urban schools are bad and corrupt, we close them and fire the bad teachers and staff. Having certainty feels good. We know what to do. We know how to act. We understand the causes and the effects of everything in our narrative.

It’s also horribly misguided and almost tautological at some point. One philosophical musing I come back to again and again is Charles Sanders Peirce’s The Fixation of Belief. Peirce argues that we lean on inadequate explanations of the world because feeling doubt and uncertainty is deeply uncomfortable. We want to escape doubt and have developed over human history many shortcuts toward feeling certain again. Peirce wants us, instead, to embrace doubt and uncertainty because that discomfort is what leads to inquiry and to a fuller and more comprehensive kind of belief.

The overall point of the essay is to look at four methods of arriving at belief and to argue for what he terms the scientific approach, an approach that reflexively weighs the evidence and regularly updates beliefs through a process of inquiry. Rather than relying on things as they have always been, or because an authority declares them, or because we intensely dislike doubt and uncertainty, we should instead undergo processes of inquiry to gather data and hypothesize and test the hypothesis. We have to regularly discard the comfort of certainty and engage in inquiry or, according to Peirce, we won’t arrive at true conclusions about the world.

It’s Scholastic Alchemy

Schools are inundated with narratives of certainty. We have so so so many stories that tell us in clear and certain terms that some specific course of action is the right one. The problem is, many of these certainties are just stories someone is telling. The course of action is only obvious because the conclusions are already assumed to be true. Nobody wants to admit that we’re working with imperfect evidence, with limited resources, with highly variable capacity to implement reforms, with changing and diverse student populations. So, we tell neat little just-so stories and implement massive policy changes because of them and are shocked when it doesn’t go as planned.

For example, “we know” that schools never tried teaching phonics and that teachers are trained in the science of reading because a podcast told us a story. This was a story that gave us certainty. This was a story that offered us an easy solution: just do the science of reading. This was a story that was wrong. 

The survey data goes on to include some other things that teachers also did, like the three cueing method that is so maligned. But the overall point, and one I’ve made before (a few times), is that there was never a time where a majority of teachers weren’t teaching phonics. The simple narrative that offered us a comfortable certainty and an obvious course of action was wrong and misleading and now we’ve legislated a generation of students into a kind of reading instruction that’s turning out not to work very well.

So now we get a new story. Stories actually. What we need now, obviously, is knowledge building. No, wait, we actually need the Science of Learning. Or maybe we need a return to strict test-based accountability. Perhaps the problem is the tests and we should let schools be innovative and freed from meeting imposed metrics? Actually, public schools are hopeless and we need a broad voucher system that allows children to escape the clutches of public education entirely. Kids just need AI tutors and personalized instruction; that’s the solution. Nah, it’s play. Kids need more play and less academics.

You see where I’m going with this. I do find some of these narratives more persuasive than others. Some have more research and more inquiry behind them than others. What I don’t see, though, is a real discussion among school leaders or policymakers about most of this. I think, probably only EdTech and AI are receiving the kind of evaluation that Peirce was talking about when he encouraged scientific, logical inquiry and even then we’re getting the evaluation after two decades of schools going all-in on technology with little to show for it.

Abbott Elementary is pretty clued into the cultural and educational zeitgeist so I fully expect there to be an episode in the upcoming season six where they get rid of all the computers that they fought for a mere two years ago. They’ll probably say something about how they had to throw them out because of privacy problems or big tech or whatever. It’s easy to fix a narrative, to create retroactive continuity so a story continues to make sense. In the real world, it’s a lot harder to retcon policies because people live with the consequences. Kids go through school with eyes glued to chromebooks and learning exclusively from decodable readers and that’s not something we get a do-over on. We can’t retcon their literacy instruction.

What’s more, admitting that we’ve made mistakes repeatedly is hard. It’s uncomfortable to tell the public that maybe we just don’t know the best way to do everything for every kid. Parent’s and communities don’t want to hear that we may have to accept the second or third best option or maybe even the least bad option. Doubt is irritating. Uncertainty feels intolerable. So we tell stories and then more stories to fix the old ones. I fear we may never stop because that’s just who we are. It’s scholastic alchemy.

Thanks for reading.