EdReal

@marcportermagee And all available evidence shows they were correct. You can have access or rigor. Not both. Definitely not in the same amount of time.

They got to universal participation but did so while throwing rigor out the door educationnext.org/the-traditiona…

The US public high school curriculum was designed by education leaders who were convinced that the majority of students weren’t capable of mastering a rigorous liberal arts education

@petergates3 @ToddTruitt76508 @mathillustrated @greg_ashman Well, he might be able to repeat it by rote but he wouldn't understand what it meant.

@ToddTruitt76508 @mathillustrated @Ed_Realist @greg_ashman I am not at all convinced you would understand it.

Article claims Anna Stokke is “expert in math education”. Debatable. As she has posted frequently, she is a mathematician, and makes a clear distinction between math education and mathematics. Be curious about who is positioned as an “expert” and why.

@ycinnewyork Actually, most private school teachers accept lower pay because they haven't got a public school credential. Usually means they move around a lot, or can't take the time to go back to school for a year, or have a spouse in a much higher paying job.

The shortage of teachers is not because of the pay (although I support higher starting pay), work schedule or pension as the teacher unions like to claim, it’s because of unruly students and little disciplinary consequences. “Generally most private school teachers just accept getting lower pay than public as a ‘fact of life.’ For most of them, I think they see the higher pay in public school like a form of ‘hazard pay.’ nypost.com/2026/05/21/us-…

What a beautiful piece. I'm a gen ed high school teacher and on a few occasions have had severely autistic students. One just astonished me because he was toilet trained, could feed himself, but would sit out in the rain while he ate if someone didn't check on him. He could read and write and speak but could not process the information he read, write, and heard. But even as I say that, I realize it's not true. He could process some of it. If you repeated it a lot of times and made it something he could see and do, that information would stay. And sometimes, miraculously, he could connect that information to some other nugget he'd retained. And so his information base built up very, very slowly but it did build up. His parents were convinced he could go to college. I was his favorite gen-ed teacher and his special ed teacher invited me to his last IEP to somehow, without saying so specifically, communicate the level of support he needed and hope they made the connection that no, he couldn't go to college. They didn't send him to college, but they did try to continue his education and the last I heard he was struggling. I hope he's doing better. I was thinking of his parents as you mentioned that you and your wife always wondered which activities were too much and which would work. Was my student capable of reading and writing and talking and building tiny bits of knowledge because of his parents' refusal to accept what most would consider reasonable expectations? Or would it have happened anyway? How much expectations vs ability matter is something that every parent everywhere wonders about. I've been following your occasional mentions of Judd over the years. Thanks so much for this essay about his graduation and all the best to Judd, you, and your family as he moves forward.

I almost hesitate to promote this, because it wasn't really intended to be a piece. I just sort of sat down and it came out. Maybe someone else out there has the same type of day today, and it'll speak to them. realclearpolitics.com/articles/2026/…

@ToddTruitt76508 @mathillustrated @greg_ashman @grok Grok isn't an opinion. I like AI fine, but it has little to offer in the way of opinions.

@Ed_Realist @mathillustrated @greg_ashman @grok It's not about convincing, it's just bringing in another opinion into the conversation.

@asymmetricinfo @JHWeissmann I dunno, I'm a landlord but I have a property manager that fixes stuff right away and is a ruthless evictor.

@JHWeissmann As I strain for a charitable explanation--maybe big landlords are better at handling repairs, but also at completing evictions?

It is darkly funny how the left has become fanatically devoted to defending petite bourgeois landlords against professionally run property managers

I don't understand why this is complicated. Do they understand what the numbers *mean*. There are plenty of test questions that assess conceptual understanding. I'm not an evangelist, either. I do think it's really funny that anyone would grant expertise about education to someone who has spent much more time as an administrator than a teacher.

@mathillustrated @Ed_Realist @greg_ashman So what is your definition? A point made by @greg_ashman was about how conceptual understanding evangelists never seem to have a definitive definition (and when they do, it somehow never is measurable w/ a standardized assessment).

@ToddTruitt76508 @mathillustrated @greg_ashman @grok Why on earth would you think anyone in this discussion would be convinced by fucking AI?

@mathillustrated @greg_ashman @Ed_Realist @grok, is there a straightforward definition of "conceptual understanding" in K-12 math ed? Or is @greg_ashman largely right in his latest article here about the lack of one by ardent advocates of conceptual understanding? fillingthepail.substack.com/p/conceptual-u…

@ToddTruitt76508 @petergates3 @mathillustrated That was my understanding.

@Ed_Realist @petergates3 @mathillustrated He's actually way to the left politically, as he likes to talk about.

I’ve spent a decade plus working to change medicine, host a popular podcast on it, and research and write extensively on it. I’m already an expert on my own health. I think it's clear I’m an expert!

@petergates3 @ToddTruitt76508 @mathillustrated I don't know if he's conservative, and I like his work, but he's absolutely not one of the most influential scholars.

@ToddTruitt76508 @Ed_Realist @mathillustrated He isn’t generally regarded as such. I don’t know many who would. He is politically conservative

@JaredWalczak @JHWeissmann I'd put Costco below some of those. But it's cheap.

@JHWeissmann Your worst opinion. Rotisserie chicken tiers: Tier 1: Costco, Perdue Tier 2: Safeway/Abertsons, Walmart Tier 3: Kroger (and Harris Teeter, etc.), Food Lion Tier 4: Giant

You know, it’s a fine deal at the price, but the Costco rotisserie chicken isn’t actually that good.

He's an opinion writer with a theory--basically, that we should teach more content knowledge to improve reading comprehension. There's not a lot of data to back him up. There's also no evidence that he ever tried to teach content to kids with two digit IQs. That said, I agree that we should teach content knowledge. But the purpose of reading comprehension is to understand text where you *don't* know the content, so it won't help with that.

@mathillustrated @Ed_Realist He writes all about education practices. I'd recommend The Schools We Need. Talk about influential - was Nick Gibb's go-to book for kicking off the K-12 cognitive science revolution out of England that's spreading around the globe. amazon.com/Schools-We-Nee…

@bendreyfuss Real corned beef hash is worth a good chunk of money. $30, maybe not, but I'd drop 20 easy.

Just spent $45 on a fancy breakfast and before you tell me this was not a good financial decision you should know that I am disabled so tread lightly, ableist

@tracewoodgrains There never should have been take home exams to start with. As for in class exams, I'd suggest kiosked chrome books. Otherwise, give the prompt and let the students write their first two paragraphs by hand. Then take a picture of their response, submit it, and then finish it.

I think take-home exams should basically be over – my Advanced Legal Research course had a take-home exam where all tools were allowed, and Claude trivialized it – and research papers have become fraught, but there are legitimate uses of AI in the planning and editing process.

if I squint I can see why they did this, but from a student perspective it seems pointless and irritating to have an extremely unreliably detectable rule around something that many students will inevitably and reasonably do as a matter of course. AI conversations are useful.

People used to be embarrassed to admit that they found everyday tasks too overwhelming to handle, now it's an identity

Many years ago Peter Greene warned about the impact of Common Core on assigning novels in high school. So did Sandy Stotsky when she refused, as a validation committee member, to sign off on the standards. forbes.com/sites/petergre…

@MaddieHWalker_ @RichardvReeves @PedroANoguera @ProfBoutakidis @TheAAPSS That's actually pretty unusual for me. But per your request....

@Ed_Realist @RichardvReeves @PedroANoguera @ProfBoutakidis @TheAAPSS this probably would’ve gone over better had it been formatted nicely and not had spelling errors

Girls have outscored boys in reading for nearly a century. It’s a persistent pattern that shows up across race, income, and country. Proud to have worked alongside Ben Smith, @PedroANoguera, and @ProfBoutakidis on the new volume on Boys' K-12 Education in The ANNALS of @TheAAPSS. journals.sagepub.com/toc/anna/716/1

@ToddTruitt76508 @mathillustrated In order to be an expert on teaching k-12 math you should at least have taught a wide range of abilities and math topics to students in that age range.

@mathillustrated @Ed_Realist @greg_ashman What is your definition?

@ToddTruitt76508 @mathillustrated That....would not make anyone an expert on math education. It would *definitely* not make anyone an expert on actually teaching math in k-12, particularly high school.

@mathillustrated She's spent a decade plus working to change K-12 math education, hosts a popular podcast on it, and researched and written extensively on it. She was already an expert on mathematics. I think it's clear she's an expert on math education.