High schools too. In many NYC schools, 1/2 the kids get the full period to complete exams and in-class writing assignments (which there are more of in the age of AI), and 1/2 must turn them in after a half hour or so and twiddle their thumbs for the remainder of the time.

A lot has happened this year. If you'd like a recap of what's happened to education research and statistics, here's my attempt. This might be a good one to listen to on your commute today. (Audio play button below headline. 16 minutes long.)

.@markseidenberg latest blog post suggests that schools might consider scrapping oral-only phonemic awareness exercises altogether and always show letters when they are teaching sounds. a bit like fusing phonemic awareness and phonics together. (5/5)

I've written about how U.S. literacy experts worry that teachers here are spending too much time on phonemic awareness and how these minutes would be better spent on phonics, vocab or knowledge building. (4/5)

UK scholars reviewed the same research about learning to read that US experts did but its 2006 "Rose Report" didn't list phonemic awareness as essential. It was more focused on graphemes, how letters or combos of letters correspond to sounds. E.g. "ph" is pronounced "f" (3/5)

He notes that in the UK, teachers don't teach phonemic awareness. "British children manage to learn to read without phonemic awareness instruction and they do so about as well our students. The British experiment suggests that PA instruction isn’t necessary..." (2/5)

A flashpoint in reading instruction is about "phonemic awareness": the sounds that make up words. For example, the word chess has 3: ch - eh - s. Teaching it is one of the pillars of the "science of reading" but a top scholar @markseidenberg is questioning its importance.🧵(1/5)

Write up by @jillbarshay of @hechingerreport on our new study, led by @Eric_hhy, examining the effects of teacher-student gender matching during elementary school on academic achievement, behavior, and executive functioning. What do we find? Not too much.

It was a great conversation with @jillbarshay and thank you for reporting our latest findings! You can find our preprint here: https://t.co/JCAOQ8xpTO We tested whether teacher–student gender matching improves student outcomes from kindergraten to 5th grade (1/🧵)

But I digress...on average, it turns out, neither boys nor girls benefit academically, socially or behaviorally from having a male teacher in elementary school. And that's what this morning's column is about. (3/3)

Mr. Sedlak was a memorably great teacher who taught me how to calculate percent change, something I still use every week. (This was during the New Math era and he also taught me to count and add in base 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9) (2/3)

If my memory serves me correctly, I had one male teacher during the entirety of my elementary school years: Mr. Sedlak for 6th grade math at Squadron Line Elementary School. (1/3) 🧵

There are a lot of SEL programs out there. Not all work. Some do. Maybe a small minority of them do. Good to see more rigorous testing of them. Ultimately we should care if they translate into learning gains.

This problem is one of the reasons that @ReadingShanahan recommends that the whole class should be reading the same grade-level text.

"Fluency doesn’t come from perfect lesson completion. It comes from messy attempts to make yourself understood, from forgetting words and using gestures, from laughing at your own mistakes. "And no app leaderboard can track that." (2/2) https://t.co/Uw8jObVDJp

I've learned about the evidence for spaced retrieval practice through @researchED_US @tombennett71 et al. But here's an argument by Krystyna Trushyna: even when online learning gets spaced retrieval practice right, it's insufficient. Learning requires much more. 🧵 (1/2)

No longer a newbie. My second insta video. This one on @ReadingShanahan new manifesto to get rid of the practice of giving kids different books to read based on their current reading abilities.

Excellent overview of the history of research on PA and its uses and misuses.

I'm experimenting with video. @jillbproofpoints

It might seem that the federal education stats agency could easily be transferred to another cabinet dept if ED is closed. But not so straightforward. Why a move could degrade the quality of higher ed data.