Ethan Hutt

@Andrew_Forrest1 What’s the strongest argument for what’s going wrong this season? Decline in velocity? More prepared batters? Not trusting his stuff?? Early season was a lot of walks. But also (my sense is) a lot of two strike counts getting away from him.

I think it’s officially time to start worrying about Walker McDuffie. I honestly would’ve preferred Forbes keep Glauber in the game.

Third Circuit Finds Zip Codes May Be Impermissible Proxy for Race in Selective High School Admissions jdsupra.com/legalnews/thir… | by @OgletreeDeakins

New blog post up: "Can We Please Stop Saying 'All Education is Political'?" About the banalities of politicization and the significance of aesthetics. #education #art open.substack.com/pub/campbellfs…

@OrinKerr Instructors often want to send students and future audiences different messages….hence the impulse around ‘secret’/internal rankings…

@OrinKerr 100% right. Would point out that these reasons also differ on whether grades are intended to communicate primarily to students or to future audiences (employers, schools etc).

Lots of discussions of grade inflation and curves on X over the last few days, prompted by the Harvard faculty proposal. These conversations tend to reflect competing assumptions about what grades are for, and I figured it might be helpful to make those competing assumptions explicit. Here are the four I see most often: (1) *Grades are a signal of how much a person knows.* On this thinking, the point of grades is to reveal how much a person knows about a topic. An A should signal they know the topic well, a B that they know it but less well, a C that they don't know it that well, etc. (2) *Grades are a signal of relative performance.* On this thinking, the point of grades is to signal a student's degree of mastery and fluency with material relative to other students. Grades are for future employers, grad school programs, etc. who want to know how students compare, and grades should provide that information. (3) *Grades are means to provide an incentive to learn.* On this thinking, the goal of grades is to create the right incentives to learn material. Students want the benefits that come with high grades, and students have to learn the material as best they can to try to do as well as they can on exams. (4) *Grades are rewards for hard work.* On this thinking, high grades are a reward to students for studying hard and completing the course. A student who has put in the effort to learn material and has shown their efforts deserves the high grade as an indicator of their effort. How you come out on grade inflation and mandatory curves depends a lot on which of these goals you adopt, I think.

Are you an AI skeptic? What kind? In the first of a four part blog series on AI Literacy, I have some fun getting Gemini, ChatGPT snd Claude to argue over the appropriate use of the term LLM. Not quite a moltbook experience but still pretty interesting. derekcbriggs.github.io/blog.html

@ScribnerUMCP Yes! Book club book! Going to get a copy.

Look forward to reading this! (@ehutt1 : You might be interested?) #fndtn-information?utm_date=20241213&utm_id=1734115706&utm_campaign=Books,New+Title,POLI,Social+Sciences&utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social&utm_content=" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">cambridge.org/core/books/goo…

Today I'm launching a new blog on AI in education. I used Claude Code to create a personal website and also used it to generate a Shiny app to teach the concept of specific objectivity for the Rasch Model. How did it go? See derekcbriggs.github.io/posts/2026-01-…

New blog post up: "Breaking the Fourth Wall," with thoughts on "The Never-Ending Story," "The Shining," and "Fleabag." #Art #Education (Link below).

This is also something I have been touching on a bit in recent blog posts: campbellfscribner.substack.com/p/it-depends-o… campbellfscribner.substack.com/p/the-fullness… campbellfscribner.substack.com/p/history-warm…

Predictably (no pun intended) thought-provoking essay from @jasonwblakely on the limits of the current political science paradigms rooted in liberalism and data crunching.

"America is becoming more anti-Semitic because its young people are becoming more anti-Semitic. This finding flies in the face of the folk wisdom that prejudice is the province of the old and will die out with them." theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/…

Let's tackle school choice history: December 9, noon to 1:00 ET, a forum for the new book "Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining the Nation’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement" With editors @shulsie & @NealMcCluskey and respondent @EHutt1! cato.org/events/fightin…

The dumbest part of this is that rather than require students’ actual SAT performance, UCSD proposes to track and guess at how students will perform based on prior data on students from their high school. Seems very likely to end badly for students from low performing HS. 3/x

One very strange (admittedly inside baseball) aspect of this story is that education researchers generally advocate for pluralism wrt data and about the necessity of “triangulating” different data sources….except when one of those sources is a standardized test. 2/

Glad the UCSD story finally seems to be getting more attention. In our book, Off the Mark, Jack and I expressly make the point that for 150+ years test scores have served the necessary function of contextualizing local information in a decentralized system. 1/

Grades are central to modern schooling, but grading remains a major target for reform. Grading policies continue to raise concerns about grade inflation and racial or gender-based bias. Learn more in Ethan Hutt's (@ehutt1 ) chapter: livehandbook.org/k-12-education…

I’m so grateful to these early readers of my new book. 🙏 And I’m also grateful to anyone who pre-orders a copy! (I’m learning that’s a big deal in the book world.) @mattyglesias @tylercowen @asymmetricinfo

Re-sharing this new brief aimed at informing practice & #cte program design - focused on parsing evidence quality & understanding mechanisms through our read of evidence. Great support from @AnnenbergInst

📢NEW RESEARCH - Absences and Achievement After the Pandemic: Evidence from Maryland and North Carolina by @david_blazar, @SethGershenson & @ehutt1. aei.org/research-produ…