Paul Thomas

Recent Publications radicalscholarship.com/speaking-truth… via @plthomasEdD

The question isn’t just what curriculum is being used. It’s what students are actually doing all day. Reading whole texts? Talking about ideas? Building meaning over time? Or moving through fragments designed for measurement? Those are not the same experience.

Navigating (Another) Reading Crisis as an Administrator: Rethinking the “Science of Reading” Movement PDF access 👇 ojed.org/JSARD/article/…

@realJennaEllis @MBurtwrites washingtonpost.com/education/2023…

@MBurtwrites It’s simply false that homeschooled kids are at greater risk. Here is a peer reviewed quantitative study. 10% of all girls in public school will be sexually abused. This isn’t defensiveness, it’s factual. nheri.org/homeschool-abu…

I've been getting some pushback from homeschooling parents for suggesting that homeschooled children are more vulnerable to abuse. Guys, we have got to set aside defensiveness & talk honestly about our communities. Homeschooling parent fragility is a real problem.🧵

Brian Ray is a homeschooling parent accused of child abuse by his own child, so I would take his flawed studies with a huge grain of salt and some healthy skepticism... See: rlstollar.com/2023/02/12/my-… See also: washingtonpost.com/education/2023….

Paul Thomas: Presentations, Professional Development, Webinars, and Consulting open.substack.com/pub/paulthomas…

Grade 8 NAEP: A More Valid Reading Story (Although Still Incomplete) open.substack.com/pub/paulthomas…

Choosing "Changing the Odds" Over "Beating the Odds" open.substack.com/pub/paulthomas…

The False Promise of Education "Miracles" and Misunderstanding Standardized Test Scores open.substack.com/pub/paulthomas…

0.00196% of NCAA athletes are transgender. 0.0000001% of votes come from undocumented immigrants. This is what MAGA obsesses over.

"I think this happens in large conservative families far more than anyone thinks it does." From the 2015 Homeschoolers Anonymous post "It's Not Just the Duggars": homeschoolersanonymous.net/2015/05/29/its…

@CJFerguson1111 Right. So much wrong

@plthomasEdD Heh. Well, also what he describes is not gamification.

Uh ...

These two old wealthier white guys (CA Republicans) backing a statewide Voter ID ballot measure: • One busted for having sex with men in bathrooms (Carl DeMaio) • The other busted for having sex with a prostitute in a car (Ken Calvert) CA GOP's best & brightest 🤣🤣🤣

The paper I’ve been most obsessed with lately is finally out: nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…! Check out this beautiful plot: it shows how much LLMs distort human writing when making edits, compared to how humans would revise the same content. We take a dataset of human-written essays from 2021, before the release of ChatGPT. We compare how people revise draft v1 -> v2 given expert feedback, with how an LLM revises the same v1 given the same feedback. This enables a counterfactual comparison: how much does the LLM alter the essay compared to what the human was originally intending to write? We find LLMs consistently induce massive distortions, even changing the actual meaning and conclusions argued for.

My latest post, "Some Reasonable Goals for NAEP Scores," now available at tomloveless.com Very quick read, two paragraphs and two tables.

It’s insane how raping kids and hanging out with someone who raped kids isn’t a deal breaker for people in America. We’ve become such a deplorable nation.

K-12 grading practices: Competence > Competition.

If the field of “writing studies” is going to center itself as site of right to AI refusal, we should probably also sit with the discipline’s 2-3 decade long intensification of the field’s enacting of curricular and pedagogical standardization and requirement.

Norms vs. Standards open.substack.com/pub/curmudguca…

Conference on College Composition resolution affirms rights of students & faculty to refuse use of generative AI in the classroom based on its corrosive implications for data privacy, labor rights, academic freedom, the environment & critical thinking insidehighered.com/news/tech-inno…

“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” — Aldous Huxley