Category / education research

by nflanagan

Ridiculous Headlines about Public Education

I’ve been writing about education policy and practice for more than 25 years, in my local newspaper (gratis), for an education nonprofit (paid), for Education Week (the journal of record for ed policy, also paid) and in my own personal blog, Teacher in a Strange Land, where I am definitely Not Paid.

When I started, back in the late 90s, I actually thought that we were living in hard times, from the standpoint of informed practice and useful education policy. What I see now, of course, is that I didn’t have a clue as to how messed up things could get. Or how the intersection of public education and politics could destroy so much good work and good will.

We have reached the point where the Onion-esque Eyes on Meme might be the most accurate representation of the daily lives of teachers:

$38,000 Master’s Degree Finally Pays Off with $61 More per Month

Parent Asks About Extra Credit at Meet the Teacher Night, Nine Days Before Anything is Assigned

And so on. Hilarious.

But shouldn’t teachers be soaking up critical commentary about ed policy, the destruction of the federal Department of Education, the latest trends and promising practices?

Well, maybe not. I am still routinely scanning the mainstream education press (such as it is). Here’s a sampling of recent headlines:

Talking About Menopause Is No Longer Taboo. Here’s Why That’s Good for Teachers

Quote: “Menopause is being recognized not only as a women’s health issue but as one that affects all of society—including the teacher workforce—three-quarters of whom are women.”

Kind of has that college freshman-term paper feel to it, no? And–good for teachers? How?

How about: Test Scores have Plunged, but Voters Aren’t Making Schools a Top Political Issue  

Missing subtitle: Like Chalkbeat wants them to.

Or: Chronic Absenteeism is Linked to Slower Academic Recovery in Math, Reading

Well, duh, say teachers everywhere.

Then there’s this: Can the Prospect of 3rd Grade Retention Improve Early Literacy? Yes, Study Says 

Response: No, Another Study Says.

Next up: Principals Can’t Manage Teacher Morale Alone. Enter the Go-Between

The thrust of this piece seems to be that managing the usual emotional, daily-grind aspects of K12 school administration (personal conflicts, new programs, novice teachers, etc.) should be outsourced to assistant principals and ‘teacher leaders’ because principals have too much important work to do. Those teachers and APs apparently can squeeze even more on to their plates, because there’s no associated plan to pay them more or reduce their workload in order to be a ‘go-between’—my nomination for the worst title you could bestow on a dedicated teaching colleague.

And this: The Ed. Department Calls for a Crackdown on Teacher Sexual Misconduct

So—is sexual misconduct on the rise? Of course not. But while they’re demolishing the oversight of public education, it’s always good to, you know, flood the zone with scary claims. “Parents should never have to wonder whether their kids’ school employs and protects sexual predators,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a (wildly ironic) statement.

This is a good spot for me to talk about working as a teacher blogger for Education Week. My experience there was a good one, but I used to hear all the time from friends who sent me EdWeek op-eds they disagreed with, charging EdWeek with being right-wing or bought off by publishers.

Education Week—like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal—is a business. They accept ads. They promote (and sometimes host) commercial programs. And they also invite a wide range of commentary, from teacher unions to pro-voucher politicians. In 2026, if you want to read one side of any educational issue, you’ll need to explore blogs, newsletters and substacks. I printed what I wanted to print, when blogging for Education Week. In nine years, I never had a piece pulled or even edited, beyond the occasional comma or headline.

The state of education journalism has not improved—better innovations, more useful research, informed commentary from practitioners–over the last 25 years. It’s become more divided, operating on the principle of “he who has the power and grant money makes the rules.” And lately, it’s been overwhelmed by stories about AI.

Here, without commentary, are a collection of AI-related headlines in the education press:

How to Use Paper to Teach About AI and Cutting-Edge Tech

Can AI Help Students Learn Social-Emotional Skills?

How an English Teacher Helps Students Find their Voices in the Age of AI

In the Race to Build Smarter AI, We Forgot to Build Smarter Humans (Opinion)

How Educators Can Encourage AI Skill-Building Without Being Tech Cheerleaders

Taken together, what do these headlines tell us? Isn’t the point of AI to trust large language models to answer our questions, without having to develop a unique voice, use paper-and-pencil methods of communicating or calculating, or spend countless hours learning to play nice with our peers?

Smarter humans via AI? Doubtful.

by nflanagan

Looping. It’s Not New. It’s Not a Panacea.

One of the most enduring truisms about public education is the existence of The Pendulum—the belief that trends in curriculum and instruction tend to repeat themselves, swinging back and forth over time between two distinct, even opposing models.

The most obvious example is the Reading Wars—both the binary presentation (there are two ways to teach reading, and my way is best) and the free-floating hostility toward anyone suggesting that teaching reading isn’t a matter of adopting The One True Way. 

The Reading Wars—a term I loathe—have been heating up periodically for the last century. It’s not surprising that veteran educators who have had measurable and observable success in teaching reading really hate being told that their go-to instructional strategies, honed by trial and error, are wrong.

Here’s the thing about that pendulum: it’s not precisely the right metaphor. Education should embrace experimentation, observation and change. Because students change, and the world changes. What goes around comes around—but maybe with a new twist, or new insight. Not much is “settled science.”

If teaching were a true profession (a topic for another blog), it would be understood as a practice, founded on core principles and knowledge, but built by individual skills and strengths within a particular context.

 Just as with any other profession, there would be the presumption of mastery—that a teacher’s experience is valuable, their judgment based on having fine-tuned their understanding of instructional issues and how to solve learning problems. But in real life, teachers are more likely to be subject to trends and laws and commerce and even political winds.

For example: When everyone was excited about new Chromebooks for all, third grade teachers were told that cursive writing was obsolete. Keyboarding was the future. But—then there was positive research on brain development via cursive writing, and ka-boom. Cursive is back. Unless it’s not.

When teachers are directed what and even how to teach, they are not using that well-honed judgment. And more teacher judgment means less pendulum, waiting around for what you know works in your classroom to be OK again, or sneaking cursive lessons to your 3rd graders because you saw it help your previous 3rd graders, practicing their cursive in letters to grandparents.

I was amused to see the headline “Charter School Finds Looping Strategy Benefits Youngest Students,” in Education Week. The video article suggests that looping (combining two grades in one classroom, with older half leaving as a new, younger half comes in) is an innovative idea. These are preschool students—3 and 4 year olds—so there’s a lot of happy talk about how the 4 year olds have an extra year of school under their tiny belts, and act as leaders for the incoming 3 year olds.

Especially with very young children, having the same teacher for two years—in a true looping or multi-age setup—could have some benefits. But there was the sense that the folks in this school had found an entirely new instructional concept with amazing benefits.

In the 1990s, I got involved in a one-year experiment in a multi-age/looping classroom in the district where I taught, and my kids went to school.

I learned about multi-age classrooms from Dr. Ellen Thompson, whom I met at a Teacher of the Year conference—she was Vermont’s Teacher of the Year in 1993. Ellen was a strong proponent of flexing the age groupings of elementary students, of really getting to know kids and their families instead of one-and-done. She had been teaching in a three-grade classroom for years and did an amazing, research-substantiated presentation on the benefits of multi-age classrooms.

Back home, my son’s first grade teacher had also been reading about multi-age classrooms and looping (which is how you get multi-age classes embedded in a traditional, grade-by-grade setting). She wanted to try it–and had a 2nd grade teacher who would partner with her.

Now, I loved this teacher. My son was doing really well in her classroom. The idea of having her again next year, in a Grade 1 / 2 looping classroom was really appealing. But there was a great deal of pushback from administrators (because they were in charge of any change) and from the union. Mainly—and this is a very important point—because they’d been trying for years to get rid of split-grade classrooms to even out class sizes.

But they agreed to try a one-year pilot of two multi-grade 1 /2 classrooms. And we were in, although more than one second grade teacher expressed regret they wouldn’t have my son in their class. What happened next was surprising to me.

Parents (who had to agree to place their student in a deliberately structured multi-age setting) shied away from the idea, seeing it as just another split, something they’d been told to avoid if possible. The assumption was that the 2nd graders in the 1 /2 split were “behind.” A mother in the Little League bleachers told me that the multiage classroom was for 2nd graders who couldn’t read, which I personally knew was far from the truth.

None of my son’s friends were in his class. And he never talked about being a leader for his first grade classmates. It turned out to be just another year of schooling. And it made me understand that context—the settled-in assumptions made by an education community—trump lots of innovative ideas. The pilot lasted one year.

So it was interesting to see looping swing, like a pendulum, across the radar again.  I wish them every success.

by nflanagan

Can AI Handle Parent-Teacher Conferences?

Please?

Here’s the actual headline: Teacher-Parent Meetings Can Be Tense. Can AI Simulations Help?

If you’ve waded around in mainstream edu-media lately, you don’t really need to read the article. Its bottom line is predictable, first chastising teacher preparation institutes for not teaching novice teachers how to handle ‘challenging’ P-T conferences, then suggesting that a little practice with a specially designed chatbot will make you ready for Jason’s Mom when she comes in, loaded for bear

To presumably add weight to the core message of the article, the first example shared is that of a former insurance litigator-turned-teacher who finds that simulated parent conferences upped his game, when real parents came in and said their child was misbehaving because he was ‘bored.’

The novice teacher was stunned at how close to reality the simulation was—and (bless his heart) found a way to genuinely listen to parents rather than pointing out that ‘bored’ was not the correct descriptor. Unruly, maybe. Rebellious. Even pre-delinquent.

But of course, being professionally tactful and actually hoping to make classroom interactions better, teachers don’t share their darker thoughts with parents. If they have to give unwelcome news, they use the ‘sandwich technique’ of surrounding unpleasant feedback with positive observations and hopeful solutions.

I couldn’t help wondering, in reading the article, if Former Insurance Litigator had not handled malicious lawyers on either side of insurance claims. Part of becoming a teacher (or a lawyer, nurse, pastor, or the guy behind the register at the 7-11) is dealing with unpleasant feedback.

Speaking personally, the most nerve-wracking parent-teacher conferences I had were very early in my career, when I was 23 and most of the parents I was meeting were a couple of decades older. My experience in professional skills before that was limited to waiting tables and working at Kentucky Fried Chicken, unlike someone who had been practicing insurance law.

But I learned how to listen without judgment. And I learned how to face unhappy parents, and believe in myself as the fully qualified teacher in the exchange. Back-of-envelope calculation of how many P-T conferences and IEPs I was part of, in 30+ years: somewhere between seven and ten thousand (music teachers have lots of students).

Not all of them were warm and fuzzy, but an overwhelming majority were, at the very least, cordial. And perhaps a dozen were memorably awful—way more than ‘tense’—although never in ways that an AI simulation could anticipate.

I actually liked meeting my students’ parents, a lot. Meeting parents is insight into how to teach their children better—it often explains a great deal about why particular kids behave as they do in the classroom. Outsourcing problems in communicating with parents to AI-created examples and model answers is a fool’s game.

What I’m waiting for is the AI-only conference, with parents accessing teacher avatars who give them a synopsis of what’s in the gradebook, and run surveillance film of the kid’s behavior in the classroom.

So efficient! So cheap! And that’s what we’re going for, right?

by nflanagan

Teachers are Patriots! Who Knew?

The world of education research is replete with studies that feel… unnecessary to folks who have spent their careers in front of K-12 classrooms. Primarily because so much good research is ignored in practice, and so much bad research becomes conventional wisdom.

For example—scientific inquiries  affirm that the best age to begin formal reading instruction would be about seven years old. Ask any early childhood teacher what our literacy success rate would be were we to initiate two-hour formal reading blocks in second grade, leaving room in kindergarten and first grade for lots of read-alouds, rhyming, picture books, letter-sound correspondence activities and development of oral language.

It’s more than that. Teachers with a few years under their belt have well-developed opinions about the best special education placements, the benefits of free play, and why taking your students outdoors yields physical and intellectual growth. Teachers can speak articulately about the post-pandemic changes in student behaviors.

How do they know about these things? Experience. Paying attention to what happens in their daily practice.

You might say that teachers’ observations and informal experiments—Teach it this way? Or that?—are the most valuable action research data to build a successful practice. But don’t say it too loud, because research is tied tightly to the source of the money that funds it—and the commercial products and politics that drive educational change.

There are lots of reasons why education research is suspect—or products are published to great fanfare, then sink like an oversized silver bullet:  An analysis of 30 years of educational research by scholars at Johns Hopkins University found that when a maker of an educational intervention conducted its own research or paid someone to do the research, the results commonly showed greater benefits for students than when the research was independent. On average, the developer research showed benefits — usually improvements in test scores —  that were 70 percent greater than what independent studies found.

Hmmm. I’d put my money on teacher perspectives about instructional strategies and materials, especially if teachers were in charge of their own professional work and offered ongoing opportunities to assess worthy curricula and teaching techniques.

Keeping the problems with ed research in mind (a book-length topic), I was amused to see this headline in Education Week this morning: Teachers Value ‘Patriotic’ Education More than Most Americans.

(Dangerous but brave) subheading: The findings stand in contrast to conservative rhetoric about ‘indoctrination’ in the social studies. And surprise! The polls themselves were conducted by EdChoice, a nonprofit advocacy organization supporting school choice, and the Morning Consult Public Opinion Tracker.

‘More than 80% of K-12 teachers thought it was “very” or “extremely” important to teach students about the Constitution’s core values, and 62% found it similarly crucial to teach that America is a fundamentally good country. In both cases, teachers were more likely than parents or the public at large to favor teaching these concepts.’

Least surprising education research result, ever. Kind of shoots holes in the ‘teachers practice leftist brainwashing’ theory that the privatizers and public school vandals keep advancing. The study showed that 57 percent of parents thought schools should overtly teach patriotism and loyalty to the United State—the exact same percentage as teachers.

There’s more: ‘Both Democratic and Republican teachers were less likely than similarly affiliated members of the public to think it important to teach students to question government actions and policies.’

Again—totally predictable. Schools are inherently moderate and cautious, politically. Your teenager is far more likely to become radicalized—in either direction—via their online presence. Online—where there isn’t a caring and educated adult moderating the decontextualized content they are reading.

I am a retired teacher, but I spent more than three decades explicitly teaching my students about being an engaged citizen, and appreciating the cultural mix that is America. I am a patriot.

Like most teachers, I am grateful to be an American. I didn’t need research to tell me so.