Misunderstandings About Teacher Compensation
In this revealing synthesis of research about teachers’ compensation, Evie Bald (July 31, 2025), shows how cash compensation to teachers fails to understand what actual compensation is from the employees' point of view.

Cautionary Tales About Curriculum Overload 
In this thoughtful article, Sarah Schwarz (Ed Week, August 4, 2025) notes that many districts that are already complying with mandatory “Science of Reading” curricula are also piling on with supplemental materials that teachers find more useful.

This week’s evidence comes from our San Bernardino City School District friends. Over the past 3 years, the DF rate decreased by 22.8% over the last year.

The new Mark Twain biography by Ron Chernow addresses forthrightly the debate about whether his books should continue to be taught in school. Chernow reveals in detail Twain’s strengths as a popular writer in books that, until recently, were part of the canon in many schools. Hemingway and others called Twain’s books “The Great American Novels.” Chernow also relentlessly details Twain’s many weaknesses, not the least of which was the stark racism, including the prolific use of the N-word in Huckleberry Finn.  

This week’s update addresses one of the most important skills every teacher must have: effective classroom management. A frequent complaint from school leaders is that they spend more time dealing with disruptive students whose teachers cannot deal with them. Thus, the school administrator has less time for their most important role – instructional leadership. The evidence comes from Edutopia, July 7, 2025, with the title “8 Small But Impactful Classroom Management Shifts.”

Here is a new view on how AI in the classroom could be positive, rather than the cheating machine that AI is often labeled. It comes from Dan Willingham of the University of Virginia.

This week’s evidence comes from Microsoft researcher and University of California professor Gloria Mark in her book “Attention Span”.

The Latest on the US Department of Education Funding and Enrollment Drops

An Unusual Take on Cheating with AI - Two interesting articles from May 2025 were published on cheating with AI.

This week’s evidence, published on April 8, 2025, concerns teacher education programs and their use (and failure to use) of evidence-based teaching practices. It is interesting to contrast teacher education in Finland and Norway—the subjects of this study—with teacher education in the US.

In this provocative new book (2025), THE FAMILY DYNAMIC: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success, by Susan Dominus, the author examines the families of exceptional siblings, from those who excelled in medicine, chess, politics, and other fields.

In this deeply troubling May 10, 2025 article in the New York Times, the author describes how the federal government is making deep intrusions into local curriculum policies.

Student engagement is a hot topic with many teachers despairing that students display an alarming degree of disinterest and disengagement in school. More than 130 studies in this meta-analysis revealed that engagement and academic achievement are very related.

Take Care when Implementing the Science of Reading.

The science of reading has taken the nation by storm, with more than half the state legislatures mandating adopting a curriculum based on the science of reading.

In this April 29, 2025, article in Education Week, Scott Gaynor, the head of an independent school, suggests caution in several areas.

While the Thomas Fordham Foundation has been critical of me, especially about my writing on grading policies, I always try to learn from them, and this week was an especially good report on math education. Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin (Matt Giani, Ph.D., Franchesca Lyra, Adam Tyner, Ph.D.) studied the impact on students who took calculus or statistics. 

Here is a quick excerpt from my new book, Fearless Leadership, that might be useful in your discussions with school and district leaders. It has to do with how leaders and governing board members can deal with public participation in board meetings:

We follow the principle to first seek to understand, and then seek to be understood.

The continued impact of chronic absenteeism:

A terrific report (January 16, 2025) from researchers at Johns Hopkins demonstrates that the lingering effects of school closures during the pandemic remain years after schools reopened. Chronic absenteeism overwhelms faculty and staff, and the negative effects are not only on those students who fail to come to school, but also on students who attend school. 

This week’s research comes from the University of Chicago which studied the impact of broadband access during the pandemic on 80,000 students. Not surprisingly, students that were high-performing before the pandemic benefited from broadband access. But the reverse was true of low-performing students.

I have attempted to separate these updates from politics, but this week’s news went over the line. The Administration is asking the Supreme Court to approve the Administration’s decision to cancel professional development for teachers that has already been approved by Congress.

I am always humbled when I read thoughtful researchers who disagree with me.  Yale Professor Paul Bloom writes in his controversial book “Against Empathy” that the pendulum has swung too far from overly demanding parents (see his “Tiger Mom” colleague also at Yale) to the snowplow parents of today.