Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. Truman Capote, writer

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Michael Jordan, NBA star in the 1990s

I want to tell you about three high school students I have taught. While the 2020s in America are surely different than the 1950s-1970s when I taught high school, I believe that there is much in the core nature of children and youth and the public school experience that is stable over time. If readers do not share that belief, they may have a hard time with this series of posts.  

First, Harold. Lanky, always stylishly dressed and so clever, he drove me up my four classroom walls. Harold was 19 and in the 11th grade. He had failed all of his subjects the year before he entered my U.S. history class. Yet he scored above national norms on college board exams.

Harold was never, and I mean, never on time to class, that is, when he chose to come to class. About five minutes after the bell, he would bang through the rear door of the room, clip-clop over to his seat. Passing a friend, he would lean over, hand cupped to his mouth, and whisper something. Anyone in earshot would laugh uproariously. Harold had arrived. Another lesson interrupted.

Whenever the class got into meaty discussions with students interacting over ideas raised in the lesson, Harold was superb in his insights and arguing skills. He used evidence to back up his statements without any encouragement from me. He revealed a sharp, inquiring mind.

But this did not happen often. What happened most of the time was that Harold would wisecrack, twist what people say, or simply beat a point to death. When that occurred, class discussion swirled around him. He loved that. He was frequently funny and delivered marvelous gag lines impromptu. In short, within the first few weeks of this class, he had settled into a comfortable role of wise buffoon. He knew precisely how to psyche teachers and how far he could go with each one.

I’m unsure how the class perceived him. When students worked in groups, no one chose to work with Harold. When I selected group members, the one he was in quickly fragmented and he would ask to work independently. On a number of occasions during class discussions, other students would tell him to shut up. I suspect that his fellow students liked him as a clown as much as he needed to act as one.

I grew to dislike Harold’s behavior intensely while trying hard not to dislike him. It was tough. I tried to deal with his wise buffoon role through after-class conferences and calls to his home with short conversations with his parent.  When he would come to class after these conferences and phone calls, his intelligence would shine as he contributed to class discussions. Time after time, however, he would back-slide. He would keep up with assignments for a week or two then do nothing for a month. He would cut class and when we would see one another in the hallway the same day, we would wave and say hello to one another.

The necessary time and energy for Harold considering one hundred-plus other students, I just didn’t have. In the last three weeks of the semester, when his class-busting behavior crossed my last threshold, I told him that every time he was late, he would spend the period in the library working independently. It was a solution that satisfied him since he would make a dramatic tardy entrance, I would give him the thumb, he would turn, salute me, and exit. It quickly became a ritual that I had locked myself into. And that is how the semester ended.

Due to his sporadic attendance, missed tests and assignments–and I searched my conscience to separate pique from fairness–I gave Harold a failing grade.

But I failed also. I could not reach Harold. He continued to stereotype me as the Teacher and I slipped into stereotyping him as a Pain-in-the-Ass Student. Did he learn anything from me as a person or teacher from the content and skills I taught? I doubt it but, in truth, I simply don’t know.

Then there was William who I take up in Part 2.

This article appeared in The 74 on January 21, 2026

Jomeilin Reyes, a seventh-grader English learner, had spent most of the fall putting his head down during writing time. Co-teachers Ashlee Robateau and Marjorie Levinson knew he struggled with comprehension and avoided assignments that felt overwhelming. But one afternoon, they brought in an AI-powered teaching assistant that walked their students through the writing task of the day. Guided by a series of prompts on their laptops, students worked through their assignment in manageable chunks. The assistant asked Jomeilin to restate the question, pull evidence from the text and explain how that evidence supported his answer — one step at a time.

Something shifted. That day, Jomeilin worked almost entirely on his own, asked one question of the assistant about where to find a quote and submitted his response. When a 3 out of 4 appeared on his screen, Jomeilin let out a small yelp, broke into a grin and asked, “Can I call my mom?”

The introduction of the platform came after teachers and school leaders spent months discussing ways to incorporate artificial intelligence to improve reading comprehension and the quality of student writing. What if an AI tool could show teachers exactly what each student was struggling with in real time, so they could give targeted help, instead of waiting a week to see patterns in graded work? The result was the launch of the teaching assistant in DREAM East Harlem Middle School’s sixth-, seventh and eighth-grade English classes. 

Marjorie and Ashlee start their class by explaining to students what they will be reading, what they will learn, the steps to understanding the text and how to approach the assignment, which focuses on one key element of the reading. Students make notes on scrap paper as they read the full text on their school-issued Chromebooks. Then, they do a close read of a smaller excerpt on the AI assistant’s platform and answer questions regarding what they read. These questions build in complexity as students work their way up to writing a full response.

Students respond to the AI assistant’s suggestions, note which advice they will adopt and why, and submit those annotations with their revision. Ashlee and Marjorie then discuss the annotations with the students and coach them through any further revisions that are needed.

The AI platform mirrors what the teachers would do one-on-one with students. It surfaces issues that Ashlee and Marjorie are already watching out for and enables them to address them with students in real time. The platform pulls together all student responses at once, showing the teachers where the whole group is struggling and highlighting strong examples from students who got it right. Teachers can see what those students did to succeed and share that approach with classmates who are stuck.

Across the school network, AI assessment and data tools have saved each teacher about 50 hours that otherwise would have been spent grading student work and entering data. Instead, they are using that time for small-group instruction, extra lesson planning and instructional practice sessions. Since the platform was introduced in October, students’ performance on benchmark assessments rose by about 5 points in math and 2 points in English — changes the school attributes in part to the extra targeted instruction those hours made possible.

But not everything about this AI adoption has been smooth. Early on, some teachers worried that requiring students to write rationales for why they accepted or rejected the assistant’s feedback felt like busywork. Sometimes, the AI feedback was too general and needed more teacher input. Other educators found the rubric too rigid for open-ended creative tasks.

DREAM’s leadership and curriculum team adjusted after listening to the teachers, building more flexibility into the system and clarifying when to use the AI platform and when to set it aside.

Marjorie Levinson’s seventh-grade English Language Arts class at DREAM East Harlem Middle School. (DREAM Charter Schools)

Other schools have asked what it would take to replicate this. Early success at DREAM has stemmed from giving teachers time to learn and master AI tools before students start using them and building in guardrails that train and enforce ethical AI use.

Jomeilin’s success that afternoon wasn’t about his use of AI itself. It was about two teachers who spent weeks thinking through his specific needs, how AI could fill the gaps and how to catch his struggles early. Marjorie had been skeptical of AI at the start of the year. year. She worried that the students who most need to build independence could become too reliant on AI.

What changed her mind was watching students like Jomeilin work through a full writing process, make decisions about feedback and build confidence along the way. Jomeilin has changed his mind about writing, too.

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*Eve Colavito is co-CEO of DREAM Charter Schools in New York City and Adam Feiler-Ware is managing director of curriculum and instruction at DREAM Charter Schools in New York City.

Grant Wiggins was a creative educator who I admired greatly. Since he often observed teachers and worked in schools, he became an informed voice for moving beyond traditional curriculum and teaching practices creating an organization called “Authentic Education.” He also encouraged teachers to become coaches for other teachers and he worked tirelessly toward altering high school structures and routines including daily schedules.

Wiggins once published an account from a veteran high school teacher who just became a coach for other teachers in her building. He says: “Because her experience is so vivid and sobering, I have kept her identity anonymous. But nothing she describes is any different than my own experience in sitting in HS classes for long periods of time. And this report of course accords fully with the results of our student surveys.” 

Here is that teacher’s account of shadowing students in her high school.*

I have made a terrible mistake.
I waited fourteen years to do something that I should have done my first year of teaching: shadow a student for a day. It was so eye-opening that I wish I could go back to every class of students I ever had right now and change a minimum of ten things – the layout, the lesson plan, the checks for understanding. Most of it!
This is the first year I am working in a school but not teaching my own classes; I am the High School Learning Coach, a new position for the school this year. My job is to work with teachers and admins. to improve student learning outcomes.
As part of getting my feet wet, my principal suggested I “be” a student for two days: I was to shadow and complete all the work of a 10^th grade student on one day and to do the same for a 12^th grade student on another day. My task was to do everything the student was supposed to do: if there was lecture or notes on the board, I copied them as fast I could into my notebook. If there was a Chemistry lab, I did it with my host student. If there was a test, I took it (I passed the Spanish one, but I am certain I failed the business one).
My class schedules for the day
(Note: we have a block schedule; not all classes meet each day):
The schedule that day for the 10^th grade student:
7:45 – 9:15: Geometry
9:30 – 10:55: Spanish II
10:55 – 11:40: Lunch
11:45 – 1:10: World History
1:25 – 2:45: Integrated Science
The schedule that day for the 12^th grade student:
7:45 – 9:15: Math
9:30 – 10:55: Chemistry
10:55 – 11:40: Lunch
11:45 – 1:10: English
1:25 – 2:45: Business
 
Key Takeaway #1
Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.
I could not believe how tired I was after the first day. I literally sat down the entire day, except for walking to and from classes. We forget as teachers, because we are on our feet a lot – in front of the board, pacing as we speak, circling around the room to check on student work, sitting, standing, kneeling down to chat with a student as she works through a difficult problem…we move a lot.
But students move almost never. And never is exhausting. In every class for four long blocks, the expectation was for us to come in, take our seats, and sit down for the duration of the time. By the end of the day, I could not stop yawning and I was desperate to move or stretch. I couldn’t believe how alert my host student was, because it took a lot of conscious effort for me not to get up and start doing jumping jacks in the middle of Science just to keep my mind and body from slipping into oblivion after so many hours of sitting passively.
I was drained, and not in a good, long, productive-day kind of way. No, it was that icky, lethargic tired feeling. I had planned to go back to my office and jot down some initial notes on the day, but I was so drained I couldn’t do anything that involved mental effort (so instead I watched TV) and I was in bed by 8:30.
If I could go back and change my classes now, I would immediately change the following three things:

• Offer brief, blitzkrieg-like mini-lessons with engaging, assessment-for-learning-type activities following directly on their heels (e.g. a ten-minute lecture on Whitman’s life and poetry, followed by small-group work in which teams scour new poems of his for the very themes and notions expressed in the lecture, and then share out or perform some of them to the whole group while everyone takes notes on the findings.)
• set an egg timer every time I get up to talk and all eyes are on me. When the timer goes off, I am done. End of story. I can go on and on. I love to hear myself talk. I often cannot shut up. This is not really conducive to my students’ learning, however much I might enjoy it.
• Ask every class to start with students’ Essential Questions or just general questions born of confusion from the previous night’s reading or the previous class’s discussion. I would ask them to come in to class and write them all on the board, and then, as a group, ask them to choose which one we start with and which ones need to be addressed. This is my biggest regret right now – not starting every class this way. I am imagining all the misunderstandings, the engagement, the enthusiasm, the collaborative skills, and the autonomy we missed out on because I didn’t begin every class with fifteen or twenty minutes of this.

Key Takeaway #2
High School students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90% of their classes.
Obviously I was only shadowing for two days, but in follow-up interviews with both of my host students, they assured me that the classes I experienced were fairly typical.
In eight periods of high school classes, my host students rarely spoke. Sometimes it was because the teacher was lecturing; sometimes it was because another student was presenting; sometimes it was because another student was called to the board to solve a difficult equation; and sometimes it was because the period was spent taking a test. So, I don’t mean to imply critically that only the teachers droned on while students just sat and took notes. But still, hand in hand with takeaway #1 is this idea that most of the students’ day was spent passively absorbing information.
It was not just the sitting that was draining but that so much of the day was spent absorbing information but not often grappling with it.
I asked my tenth-grade host, Cindy, if she felt like she made important contributions to class or if, when she was absent, the class missed out on the benefit of her knowledge or contributions, and she laughed and said no.
I was struck by this takeaway in particular because it made me realize how little autonomy students have, how little of their learning they are directing or choosing. I felt especially bad about opportunities I had missed in the past in this regard. If I could go back and change my classes now, I would immediately:

Key takeaway #3
You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.
I lost count of how many times we were told be quiet and pay attention. It’s normal to do so – teachers have a set amount of time and we need to use it wisely. But in shadowing, throughout the day, you start to feel sorry for the students who are told over and over again to pay attention because you understand part of what they are reacting to is sitting and listening all day. It’s really hard to do, and not something we ask adults to do day in and out. Think back to a multi-day conference or long PD day you had and remember that feeling by the end of the day – that need to just disconnect, break free, go for a run, chat with a friend, or surf the web and catch up on emails. That is how students often feel in our classes, not because we are boring per se but because they have been sitting and listening most of the day already. They have had enough.
In addition, there was a good deal of sarcasm and snark directed at students and I recognized, uncomfortably, how much I myself have engaged in this kind of communication. I would become near apoplectic last year whenever a very challenging class of mine would take a test, and without fail, several students in a row would ask the same question about the test. Each time I would stop the class and address it so everyone could hear it. Nevertheless, a few minutes later a student who had clearly been working his way through the test and not attentive to my announcement would ask the same question again. A few students would laugh along as I made a big show of rolling my eyes and drily stating, “OK, once again, let me explain…”
Of course it feels ridiculous to have to explain the same thing five times, but suddenly, when I was the one taking the tests, I was stressed. I was anxious. I had questions. And if the person teaching answered those questions by rolling their eyes at me, I would never want to ask another question again. I feel a great deal more empathy for students after shadowing, and I realize that sarcasm, impatience, and annoyance are a way of creating a barrier between me and them. They do not help learning.
If I could go back and change my classes now, I would immediately:

• Dig deep into my personal experience as a parent where I found wells of patience and love I never knew I have, and call upon them more often when dealing with students who have questions. Questions are an invitation to know a student better and create a bond with that student. We can open the door wider or shut if forever, and we may not even realize we have shut it.
• I would make my personal goal of “no sarcasm” public and ask the students to hold me accountable for it. I could drop money into a jar for each slip and use it to treat the kids to pizza at the end of the year. In this way, I have both helped create a closer bond with them and shared a very real and personal example of goal-setting for them to use a model in their own thinking about goals.
• I would structure every test or formal activity like the IB exams do – a five-minute reading period in which students can ask all their questions but no one can write until the reading period is finished. This is a simple solution I probably should have tried years ago that would head off a lot (thought, admittedly, not all) of the frustration I felt with constant, repetitive questions.

I have a lot more respect and empathy for students after just one day of being one again. Teachers work hard, but I now think that conscientious students work harder. I worry about the messages we send them as they go to our classes and home to do our assigned work, and my hope is that more teachers who are able will try this shadowing and share their findings with each other and their administrations. This could lead to better “backwards design” from the student experience so that we have more engaged, alert, and balanced students sitting (or standing) in our classes.

___________________

*Grant Wiggins’ obituary is here.

Shadowing students as they go from class to class gives researchers information about daily schooling unlike classroom observations and teacher interviews can offer. I have shadowed students many times in my career as a social studies teacher, district superintendent, and university professor. In sitting with students, I have found it enormously helpful in getting their angle of vision on lessons while they used laptop computers in their classes. I hear their murmuring to one another and listen to their reactions to parts of the lesson, and what they said in going from one class to another. And that is what I did after Las Montanas High School (a pseudonym) in San Jose Unified School District made laptop computers available to every teacher and student over a decade ago.

Here is what I wrote after shadowing students at this high school.

The Las Montanas High School student’s day is filled with eight class periods, movement through crowded corridors between classes, going to lockers, seeing friends, having lunch, checking cell phone messages (not allowed during classes), and making it to the next class without being marked tardy.

I managed to get five students to volunteer and secured their parents’ consent to allow me to shadow them through their school day. I met with the students to explain the project I was doing and how I would be shadowing them. I told them that I would meet each one before their first period class, introduce myself to the teacher, and sit at a desk far from the shadowed student. After class, we would walk to their next one, and so on through the rest of the school day (including physical education). At lunch, I would offer to buy them whatever they wanted and would ask questions about the classes that we had attended. If they preferred meeting with their friends at lunch–as three of the five did–I would save my questions for the end of the day when I could ask follow-up questions.

These students asked me many questions: What did I want to find out about teachers, laptops, and students at Las Montanas, and the possible awkwardness of an “old white man walking with me,” as one student put it. I answered all of their questions including confidentiality and their being given fictitious names, were I to write about them.

What did I see in these classes? I shadowed Diane (all names are pseudonyms), a 14 year-old ninth grader, through her academic schedule. Like the other four students, Diane had been given a laptop to use in school and at home. Diane is heavily involved in Las Montanas sports, wired (she has a cell phone, ipod, in addition to the laptop), and believes that what she is learning in school will prepare her for college. She is engaged and enthusiastic about school expressing strong hope about her future. According to a recent Gallup Student Poll, Diane mirrors the 63 percent of U.S. students who are hopeful, enthusiastic, and engaged in school.

For the rest of this post I will describe what I saw in Diane’s first period class.

*Biology. Ms. Colusia wears a white lab coat. Long lab tables are arranged in rows facing the teacher and her desk. There are 19 students present when the tardy bell rings at 7:55AM.

Ms. Colusia welcomes the students and tells them that they will be using their laptops for research later in the week. All but two of the students have laptops with them.

Ms. Colusia directs students to the textbook chapter on organ systems and reviews yesterday’s lesson on how cells make up tissue and tissues make up organs.  She then tells students to complete a table where they list the body system (nervous, digestive, etc.), the organs that make up that body system, their functions, and the types of cells. Answers, she says, are in the chapter. She gives students 20 minutes to complete the table. Three students without texts get passes to to their lockers.

A hum rises as students work individually, in pairs, and trios, Ms. Colusia walks around checking their work and answering questions. After nearly a half-hour, the teacher sees that most students have not completed the table. She then tells the student to complete it for homework, adding that there will be 20 percent extra credit if the table is typed up rather than written in ink.

Ms. Colusia then passes out a three-page handout “California Content Standards: Biology/Life Sciences” which lists specific state standards and the number of test items for each standard. The teacher calls the class’s attention to the “Physiology” standard that deals with cells, organs, and body systems. She asks particular students to read the standard and then ask questions (“What’s the main point of this standard?”). Students yell out answers. This back-and-forth of teacher questions and student choral answers continues for 12 minutes. Teacher reminds class that on the state test: “Focus on the information and nothing else. That’s what they will test you on.”

Teacher proceeds to give assignment for next day, slightly changing the homework that she had assigned earlier about completing the table. She tells students to bring their laptops to class next week because they will be doing research on organ systems. Some students, alert to the end of the period in a few minutes, close their books, gather their papers, put laptops in their backpacks, and get ready, for the buzzer. It sounds at 8:46. Diane, the rest of class, and I leave.

_________________

*Las Montanas is a pseudonym for a high school in the San Jose Unified School District. The high school had distributed laptops to all teachers and students a few months before I arrived. I met with the principal explained the research I wanted to do on teachers’ and students’ use of laptops The principal consented to my contacting all Las Montanas teachers and students. I met with those teachers who had volunteered and then met with students who had done the same. For the students, I got parental permission to accompany them from class-to-class including having lunch with them. I did this study in 2010-2011.

If readers check email or ask questions of Google far more than they would ever admit, brain researchers have not yet helped us exolain these common obsessions.

On the one hand, neuroscientists and journalists have argued that unrestrained access to information and communication have rewired the brain. The brain is plastic altering itself  in response to the environment and creating new neural pathways that ancestors lacked. So multi-tasking has become the norm and, better yet, we are more productive and connected to people as never before.

On the other hand, there are those neuroscientists who concur that the brain is plastic but it has hardly been rewired. Instead, complete access to information and people–friends, like-minded enthusiasts, and strangers–unleashes brain chemicals that give us pleasure. Or as one psychologist put it:

What the Internet does is stimulate our reward systems over and over with tiny bursts of information (tweets, status updates, e-mails) that … can be delivered in more varied and less predictable sequences. These are experiences our brains did not evolve to prefer, but [they are] like drugs of abuse….

To these researchers and journalist, the Internet and social media are addictive.

So these are competing views emerging from current brain research. Most studies producing these results, however, come from experiments on selected humans and animals. They are hardly definitive and offer parents and educators little about the impact on children and youth from watching multiple screens hours on end.

And nothing is mentioned about the  issue that both neuroscientists and philosophers persistently stumble over. Is the brain the same as the mind? Is consciousness–our sense of self–the product of neural impulses or is it a combination of memories, perceptions, and beliefs apart from brain activity picked up in MRIs? On one side are those who equate the brain with the mind (David Dennett) and on the other side are those who call such equivalency, “neurotrash.”

Yet even with the unknowns about the brain, its plasticity, and the mind, much less about what effects the Internet has upon young children, youth, and adults–“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” asked one writer–many school reformers have run with brain research with nary a look backward.

Consider those school reformers including technology enthusiasts who hate current school structures with such a passion that they call for bricks-and-mortar schools to go the way of  gas-lit street lights and be replaced by online instruction or other forms of remote schooling that embrace high-tech fully. Cathy Davidson, Duke University professor, to cite one example, makes such a case.

[T]he roots of our twenty-first-century educational philosophy go back to the machine age and its model of linear, specialized, assembly-line efficiency, everyone on the same page, everyone striving for the same answer to a question that both offers uniformity and suffers from it. If the multiple-choice test is the Model T of knowledge assessment, we need to ask: What is the purpose of a Model T in an Internet age?

Others call for blended learning, a combination of face-to-face (F2F in the lingo) and online lessons.

There’s this myth in the brick and mortar schools that somehow the onset of online K-12 learning will be the death of face-to-face … interaction. However this isn’t so — or at least in the interest of the future of rigor in education, it shouldn’t be. In fact, without a heaping dose of F2F [face-to-face] time plus real-time communication, online learning would become a desolate road for the educational system to travel.

The fact is that there is a purpose in protecting a level of F2F and real-time interaction even in an online program…. The power is in a Blended Learning equation:

Face-to-Face + Synchronous Conversations + Asynchronous Interactions = Strong Online Learning Environment

Then there are those who embrace brain research with lusty (and uncritical) abandon.

Students’ digitally conditioned brains are 21st century brains, and teachers must encourage these brains to operate fully in our classrooms…. If we can help students balance the gifts technology brings with these human gifts, they will have everything they need.

So where are we? Listen to cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham and frequent blogger. He has offered three bullet-point facts for those educators caught up in brain-based research:

#The brain is always changing

#The connection between the brain and behavior is not obvious.

#Deriving useful information for teachers from neuroscience is slow, painstaking work.

Willingham ended his piece by asking a key question:

“How can you tell the difference between bonafide research and schlock? That’s an ongoing problem and for the moment, the best advice may be that suggested by David Daniel, a researcher at James Madison University: ‘If you see the words ‘brain-based,’ run.’ “

While teaching at Stanford University between 1981-2001, I had also returned twice to high school teaching. Having worked with many superintendents while at Stanford through sponsoring Superintendent Roundtables at the Graduate School of Education, I asked two district leaders who I knew well whether I could teach a U.S. History class for a semester in one of their high schools. Both district leaders agreed and asked two of their high school principals to make that happen.

Each principal found a social studies teacher who was willing to let me teach their first period class for a semester. After teaching the early morning high school U.S. History class, I would drive to the Stanford campus and teach my graduate courses there and meet with students. While my Stanford teaching load was far from onerous, going from high school to university made for a long day. But very worthwhile.

Why did I do this? Then and now, the answers remain the same. First, I found teaching high school juniors very satisfying when I had taught years earlier. Second, I wanted to find out whether my teaching had changed in the years I was absent from the high school classroom. Third, because I had taught for 14 years in urban high schools and after seven years as a superintendent and fifteen years as a university professor, I wanted to see how much, if at all, high school had changed.

The final reason was personal. I wanted to be credible to my Stanford graduate students on their path to becoming certified teachers in California who were taking my social studies methods course .

Here is what I remember about teaching in one of those two Bay area high schools.

As I was leaving my first period U.S. History class, the teacher who used the room after me called me back. “Larry, it would help me start my class….” She paused and then rushed on, “if you could erase your boards–I need the space, and we do that for one another here.”

I blushed and mumbled an apology. I erased the chalkboards for the rest of the semester. A lesson learned in my first week of school after an absence of 16 years from teaching high school students.

What was I doing? Every day between 8 and 8:50 A.M. for one semester, I taught an 11th grade U.S. History class in a Santa Clara County high school. After teaching the class, I returned to Stanford University to teach and advise students.

The high school enrolled 1,600 students, of whom over one-third were minority. More that 90% of the graduating class chose higher education. I taught a “skills” class, however. It was intended to be small in size and limited to students who had performed poorly in academic subjects or had major difficulties in reading and writing. In the first few weeks, I had 17 students, all but two of whom were Hispanic or Black.

What did I learn after this extended absence from teaching high school students? Three lessons: those students in my “skills” class still varied greatly in their performance; the “right-answer” syndrome dominated the class; and my students had a dim view of their intellectual ability.

Administrators in this high school created “skills” class by grouping students based on achievement and teachers’ recommendations. Yet reading test scores for my students ranged from 4th to 11th grade. If the purpose of bringing such students together in one class was to make it easier to teach similar students, it failed.

Meanwhile, there was the “right-answer” syndrome. Students believed that questions had correct answers either from the textbook or the teacher. And they had learned survival rules in elementary school: keep silent or say as little as possible without appearing stupid.

Any teacher who is interested in getting students to reason aloud–which requires giving answers in front of classmates that may not be “correct”–must change the rules.

But changing rules was tough to do. We had intense, almost hostile, discussions about questions that had no correct answer such as: In the Civil War, “Why did southern poor white farmers who didn’t own a single slave end up volunteering to fight for wealthy planters who owned all the slaves?” To answer such questions, students had to distinguish between facts and opinions, decide what qualified as evidence, cite their sources, and discover that history is interpreting facts. It was a struggle.

The “right answer” syndrome, of course, prevails across most high school subjects but they are far more pronounced in “skills” classes. Giving right answers to teachers’ questions and doing worksheets is “normal” especially when multiple-choice tests are given repeatedly. “How can this class be called U.S. History,” students asked me “if we cannot be sure of which answers are wrong?” And, the most basic question of all that went unasked: “If I cannot count on there being correct answers, how can I ever get out of high school?”

Just as evident as the “right answer” syndrome was the students’ low intellectual self-confidence. At least half of the class knew one another from other “skills” classes or special education programs. What was evidence of low self-regard? When I asked a student to read her paragraph comparing early 20th century immigrants’ dreams of a better life with her own dreams, she refused. “It’s stupid,” she said. “I never do these things right.” Often, when I asked students for their opinions on issues raised in class, they gave one-word responses–seldom a full sentence, never a paragraph. For those whose native language was not English, the reluctance was understandable. But when I pressed other students to enlarge their answers, they would say, “I don’t know nothing,” or “What I have is dumb.”

Establishing a mood in the class that encouraged students to take intellectual risks, to give opinions backed by evidence, and to follow up their responses without fear of being put down took the entire semester. For six of the 17 students, I failed. They would seldom speak in class. Another six students showed modest improvement by speaking at length without apologizing for what they were about to say. And five students blossomed. They gained confidence in stating answers and punched back at my counter-arguments by asking me for my evidence and which sources I had used.

My experience with this class drove home a point I had first learned as a teacher in the 1950s and 1960s: I was not simply fighting the usual battles to get students to think and participate in class; I was also engaged in a losing struggle to lift students’ intellectual confidence after being labeled and segregated earlier in their school career.

A New York Times journalist, Natasha Singer covers technology access and use. This article appeared January 2, 2026.

In early November, Microsoft said it would supply artificial intelligence tools and training to more than 200,000 students and educators in the United Arab Emirates.

Days later, a financial services company in Kazakhstan announced an agreement with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT Edu, a service for schools and universities, for 165,000 educators in Kazakhstan.

Last month, xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, announced an even bigger project with El Salvador: developing an A.I. tutoring system, using the company’s Grok chatbot, for more than a million students in thousands of schools there.

Fueled partly by American tech companies, governments around the globe are racing to deploy generative A.I. systems and training in schools and universities.

Some U.S. tech leaders say A.I. chatbots — which can generate humanlike emails, create class quizzes, analyze data and produce computer code — can be a boon for learning. The tools, they argue, can save teachers time, customize student learning and help prepare young people for an “A.I.-driven” economy.

But the rapid spread of the new A.I. products could also pose risks to young people’s development and well-being, some children’s and health groups warn.

A recent study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that popular A.I. chatbots may diminish critical thinking. A.I. bots can produce authoritative-sounding errors and misinformation, and some teachers are grappling with widespread A.I.-assisted student cheating.

Silicon Valley for years has pushed tech tools like laptops and learning apps into classrooms, with promises of improving education access and revolutionizing learning.

Still, a global effort to expand school computer access — a program known as “One Laptop per Child” — did not improve students’ cognitive skills or academic outcomes, according to studies by professors and economists of hundreds of schools in Peru. Now, as some tech boosters make similar education access and fairness arguments for A.I., children’s agencies like UNICEF are urging caution and calling for more guidance for schools.

“With One Laptop per Child, the fallouts included wasted expenditure and poor learning outcomes,” Steven Vosloo, a digital policy specialist at UNICEF, wrote in a recent post. “Unguided use of A.I. systems may actively de-skill students and teachers.”

Education systems across the globe are increasingly working with tech companies on A.I. tools and training programs.

In the United States, where states and school districts typically decide what to teach, some prominent school systems recently introduced popular chatbots for teaching and learning. In Florida alone, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest school system, rolled out Google’s Gemini chatbot for more than 100,000 high school students. And Broward County Public Schools, the nation’s sixth-biggest school district, introduced Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot for thousands of teachers and staff members.

Outside the United States, Microsoft in June announced a partnership with the Ministry of Education in Thailand to provide free online A.I. skills lessons for hundreds of thousands of students. Several months later, Microsoft said it would also provide A.I. training for 150,000 teachers in Thailand. OpenAI has pledged to make ChatGPT available to teachers in government schools across India.

The Baltic nation of Estonia is trying a different approach, with a broad new national A.I. education initiative called “A.I. Leap.”

The program was prompted partly by a recent poll showing that more than 90 percent of the nation’s high schoolers were already using popular chatbots like ChatGPT for schoolwork, leading to worries that some students were beginning to delegate school assignments to A.I.

Estonia then pressed U.S. tech giants to adapt their A.I. to local educational needs and priorities. Researchers at the University of Tartu worked with OpenAI to modify the company’s Estonian-language service for schools so it would respond to students’ queries with questions rather than produce direct answers.

Introduced this school year, the “A.I. Leap” program aims to teach educators and students about the uses, limits, biases and risks of A.I. tools. In its pilot phase, teachers in Estonia received training on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini chatbots.

“It’s critical A.I. literacy,” said Ivo Visak, the chief executive of the A.I. Leap Foundation, an Estonian nonprofit that is helping to manage the national education program. “It’s having a very clear understanding that these tools can be useful — but at the same time these tools can do a lot of harm.”

Estonia also recently held a national training day for students in some high schools. Some of those students are now using the bots for tasks like generating questions to help them prepare for school tests, Mr. Visak said.

“If these companies would put their effort not only in pushing A.I. products, but also doing the products together with the educational systems of the world, then some of these products could be really useful,” Mr. Visak added.

This school year, Iceland started its own national A.I. pilot in schools. Now several hundred teachers across the country are experimenting with Google’s Gemini chatbot or Anthropic’s Claude for tasks like lesson planning, as they aim to find helpful uses and to pinpoint drawbacks.

Researchers at the University of Iceland will then study how educators used the chatbots.

Students won’t use the chatbots for now, partly out of concern that relying on classroom bots could diminish important elements of teaching and learning.

“If you are using less of your brain power or critical thinking — or whatever makes us more human — it is definitely not what we want,” said Thordis Sigurdardottir, the director of Iceland’s Directorate of Education and School Services.

Tinna Arnardottir and Frida Gylfadottir, two teachers participating in the pilot at a high school outside Reykjavik, say the A.I. tools have helped them create engaging lessons more quickly.

Ms. Arnardottir, a business and entrepreneurship teacher, recently used Claude to make a career exploration game to help her students figure out whether they were more suited to jobs in sales, marketing or management. Ms. Gylfadottir, who teaches English, said she had uploaded some vocabulary lists and then used the chatbot to help create exercises for her students.

“I have fill-in-the-blank word games, matching word games and speed challenge games,” Ms. Gylfadottir said. “So before they take the exam, I feel like they’re better prepared.”

Ms. Gylfadottir added that she was concerned about chatbots producing misinformation, so she vetted the A.I.-created games and lessons for accuracy before asking her students to try them. Ms. Gylfadottir and Ms. Arnardottir said they also worried that some students might already be growing dependent on — or overly trusting of — A.I. tools outside school.

That has made the Icelandic teachers all the more determined, they said, to help students learn to critically assess and use chatbots.

“They are trusting A.I. blindly,” Ms. Arnardottir said. “They are maybe losing motivation to do the hard work of learning, but we have to teach them how to learn with A.I.”

Teachers currently have few rigorous studies to guide generative A.I. use in schools. Researchers are just beginning to follow the long-term effects of A.I. chatbots on teenagers and schoolchildren.

“Lots of institutions are trying A.I.,” said Drew Bent, the education lead at Anthropic. “We’re at a point now where we need to make sure that these things are backed by outcomes and figure out what’s working and what’s not working.”

I have written in the past of my experiences as the Arlington County (VA) Superintendent and how the job affected my life and family during and after the workday. In this post, I describe how my wife Barbara and my daughters Sondra and Janice who went to public schools in the County experienced what it was like to be in the family of the district’s school chief. All of what follows occurred during the seven years I served as Superintendent (1974-1981).

The superintendency was both exhilarating and exhausting. As a line from a John Denver song put it: “Some days were diamonds; some days were stones.” What values I prized about public service and helping people were enacted daily; what skills I had were tapped frequently, and the superintendency pushed me into learning new skills and plumbing hidden reserves of energy. In short, being superintendent stretched me in ways I keenly felt were worthwhile. I enjoyed the job immensely. But–there has to be a but–there were a number of job-related issues that arose over the years, softening my rosy assessment, forcing me to face the inevitable trade-offs that accompany the top post in a school district.

What initially turned our lives topsy-turvy was the time I had to spend on the job after two years that I spent as a university graduate student and, before that, working as a teacher for nearly a decade.

As Superintendent, my day began at 8:00 A.M. in the office and for two to three nights a week (and even more nights out during budget season) ended around 10-11PM. On those long days, I would race home for dinner at 5:00 P.M. and leave two hours later for a board meeting, work session, or some other community event.

During the week, I saw my family in the mornings and at dinner-time. Fatigue tracked me relentlessly the first few years; at home I’d fall asleep watching the evening news and take long afternoon naps on weekends. Adjusting to new time demands proved difficult for all of us.

While we had not given too much thought to the issue of privacy, Barbara and I had made a few decisions about our family time. We had agreed that Friday evening dinners to celebrate the Sabbath were a high priority. I had asked the school board to be excused from obligations on Friday evenings, and they honored my request for the seven years I served, except for those few instances when I decided that I had to attend a meeting or community event. Apart from critical County Supervisors’ Board meetings on Saturdays, my bosses made few demands upon me during the week-ends, apart from phone calls.

A listed telephone number proved to be less of an issue than we had anticipated. I rarely received more than a half-dozen calls a week from parents, students, or citizens, except during snow storms or when I made a controversial recommendation to the School Board. Surprisingly, we received few crank or obscene phone calls.

Buffering the family from the job was tough enough. Deciding what to do about those social invitations where much business was transacted informally, without reducing time spent with my family troubled me. The first week on the job, for example, a principal who then headed the administrators’ union invited me to join a poker game with a number of principals and district office administrators that met twice a month. My predecessor, he said, had been a regular player for the five years that he was superintendent. Moreover, it would offer me a splendid chance to meet some of the veteran staff away from the office in relaxed surroundings. Aware of the advantage in joining and the costs in time with my family, I thanked the principal for the generous invitation but said no. It had also occurred to me that I would be making personnel changes and a certain amount of social distance from people I supervised might be best.

Dinner invitations also proved troublesome as well. Invariably at these affairs, conversations would center on school matters and juicy political gossip. These evenings became work for me and difficult for Barbara who was immersed in completing her undergraduate degree. The last thing both of us wanted to hear on a Saturday night out was more about the Arlington schools. Except for socializing with the few friends that we had made in the County whom we could relax with and not be concerned about what we said, mainly members of the School Board, we turned down most invitations after our second year in Arlington.

We remained, however, part of the ceremonial life in Arlington. I ate chicken at boy scout dinners, sampled hors d’oeurves at Chamber of Commerce affairs (until I dropped out from the organization because of its persistent attacks upon school budgets), spoke at church suppers; and represented the school board at civic meetings.

We were fortunate to have had a network of close friends in Washington, D.C. since 1963 where I had worked as a teacher and administrator for nearly a decade. I could see now, in ways that I could not have seen earlier, that by entering the Arlington community as an outsider and remaining separate from existing social networks, that there would be certain costs. That was, I believe, one price we paid for being outsiders and for trying to prevent the superintendency from completely taking over our lives.

But, of course, the shadow of the superintendency, with all of its pluses and minuses, fell over the family nonetheless. For example, our daughters (ages ten and twelve in 1974) were not only singled out, both positively and negatively by Arlington teachers, they also had to deal with all of the complications of becoming teenagers, losing old friends and gaining new ones, and coping with schoolwork and family issues. Their desire to be accepted and just be like others their age put a constant strain on both girls; from early on they were singled out as being different because of their father’s position in the community and their religion. Active, smart, independent, and friendly, Sondra and Janice both enjoyed and hated the attention. While some teachers were especially sensitive to the awkward position the girls were in, others were callous. Principals of the schools they attended were very understanding and tried to help, but little could be done with the occasionally insensitive teacher.

When salary negotiations heated up, for example, two of their teachers made caustic remarks to each girl about their father’s lack of concern for teachers’ economic welfare. The pressures were such that our eldest daughter wanted to try another school. It proved to be the hardest decision that Barbara and I made while I was superintendent. For us, her welfare was more important than concerns over what others might think of a superintendent pulling his daughter out of the public schools.

We transferred her to a private school in Washington, D.C., where she began to thrive academically and socially. Of course, the local newspaper carried an article about it. Our other daughter went to a private school for one year but wanted very much to return to the Arlington schools and did so for her high school years.

Barbara was clear on what she wanted. She did not wish to be “the superintendent’s wife.” She wanted to complete her undergraduate degree and enter a profession. In seven years, she finished her degree at George Washington University and earned a masters in social work from Catholic University while completing the necessary internships for a career in clinical social work. Between caring for a family, doing coursework, research papers, tests, and coping with a tired husband, Barbara had little time or concern for meeting others’ expectations of how a superintendent’s wife should act.

Yet, try as we might, it was difficult to insulate ourselves from the fact that I was the superintendent. My efforts, for example, to keep my family and my job separate when serious decisions had to be made often did not work. Firing a teacher, determining the size of a pay raise, recommending which low enrollment schools to close, and dozens of other decisions had to be made. After listening to many individuals and groups, receiving advice from my staff, and hearing all the pros and cons from my closest advisers, I still had to make the recommendation to close a school to the School Board. At such times, I might discuss the situation with Barbara. Often, however, there were family concerns that required our attention instead.

Yet I would still come home with the arguments ricocheting in my mind; and I would carry on an internal dialogue while I was eating dinner, raking leaves, playing with the girls, or on weekend trips with the family. I was home, but I was distant.

Over the years with the help of my wife, I became more skilled at telling my family that something from the job was bothering me and that if I seemed distracted it had nothing to do with them. But I never acquired the knack of leaving serious Issues on the doorstep when I came home. Some-times, escaping the job was impossible. Newspaper articles or the 11:00 p.m. television news about Arlington County schools entered our home whether we liked it or not.

What did stun me, however, was the lengths that some people would go for political advantage, including destroying someone’s reputation. Elected officials, accustomed to the political in-fighting, might find such back-biting trivial. It jolted me and my family.

I’ll give one example. Shortly before the school board reappointed me for another four years, a Board member called to ask if I had ever been arrested in Washington, D.C., on a drug charge. No, I hadn’t, I told her. She said that there was a story that would appear in the next day’s local newspaper stating that I had been arrested and put in jail for possession of heroin. Within the next hour, I received a dozen calls from county officials, parents, friends of School Board members, and the head of the teachers’ union asking me if the newspaper story were true and if there was anything they could do to help. Finally, a newspaper reporter called to say that they were printing the story and did I have any comments to make. I told the reporter that there was no basis for the allegation and that before printing such a lie they would do well to get a record of the alleged arrest and other documentation. The newspaper did not print the story.

What shocked me most was the fragility of a professional reputation, the willingness of people to believe the worst (this occurred a few years after the Watergate scandal led to President Nixon’s resignation), and the lengths some people would go to destroy someone they disliked politically.

The seven years as superintendent taught me a great deal about the mixing of public and private lives for officials like myself. More prosaic than corrupt governors or U.S. Senators who party and then resign for disclosure of sexual jaunts, our experiences mapped an unfamiliar terrain for a novice superintendent and family who tried hard to maintain their privacy.

Reducing classroom distractions during a lesson is essential to any definition of effective teaching, much less student learning. With cell phones ubiquitous among students, distractions multiply. What, for example, do some teachers do before or during a lesson to manage cell phone use?

Veteran math teacher Tony Riehl wrote a post on this subject. It appeared May 22, 2017 . He has taught high school math courses in Montana for 35 years. I added math teaching blogger Dan Meyer’s comments on Riehl’s post.

I learned early on with cell phones, that when you ask a student to hand you their phone, it very often becomes confrontational. A cell phone is a very personal item for some people.

To avoid the confrontation I created a “distraction box” and lumped cell phones in with the many other distraction that students bring to class. These items have changed over time, but include “fast food” toys, bouncy balls, Rubics cubes, bobble heads, magic cards, and the hot item now are the fidget cubes and fidget spinners.

A distraction could be a distraction to the individual student, the other students or even a distraction to me. On the first day of the year I explain to my students that if I make eye contact with them and point to the distraction box, they have a choice to make. If they smile and put the item in the box, they can take the item out of the box on the way out of the room. If they throw a fit and put the distraction in the box, they can have it back at the end of the day. If they refuse to put the distraction in the box, they go to the office with the distraction.

On the first day of the year we even practice smiling while we put an item in the box. The interaction is always kept very light and the students really are cooperative. It has been a few years since an interaction actually became confrontational, because I am not asking them to put the item in my hand. I even have students sometimes put their cell phone in the box on the way in the door because they know they are going to have trouble staying focused.

This distraction box concept really has changed the atmosphere of my room. Students understand what a distraction is and why we need to limit distractions….

This Is My Favorite Cell Phone Policy

By Dan Meyer • May 24, 2017

Schools around the world are struggling to integrate modern technology like cell phones into existing instructional routines. Their stances towards that technology range from total proscription – no cell phones allowed from first bell to last – to unlimited usage. Both of those policies seem misguided to me for the same reason: they don’t offer students help, coaching, or feedback in the complex skills of focus and self-regulation.

Enter Tony Riehl’s cell phone policy, which I love for many reasons, not least of which because it isn’t exclusively a cell phone policy. It’s a distractions policy.

What Tony’s “distraction box” does very well:

• It makes the positive statement that “we’re in class to work with as few distractions as possible.” It isn’t a negative statement about any particular distraction. Great mission statement.
• Specifically, it doesn’t single out cell phones. The reality is that cell phones are only one kind of technology students will bring to school, and digital technology is only one distractor out of many. Tony notes that “these items have changed over time, but include fast food toys, bouncy balls, Rubik’s cubes, bobble heads, magic cards, and the hot items now are the fidget cubes and fidget spinners.”
• It acknowledges differences between students. What distracts you might not distract me. My cell phone distracts my learning so it goes in the box. Your cell phone helps you learn so it stays on your desk.
• It builds rather than erodes the relationship between teachers and students. Cell phone policies often encourage teachers to become detectives and students to learn to evade them. None of this does any good for the working relationship between teachers and students. Meanwhile, Tony describes a policy that has “changed the atmosphere of my room,” a policy in which students and teachers are mutually respected and mutually invested.

The weekly “Marshall Memo” curates research articles from many journals that Kim Marshall believes teachers, administrators, and parents will find useful.

I have known Kim for decades when he was a teacher in the Boston public schools, served as a district principal for 15 years and then worked in the central office with various superintendents.

I trust his judgment on what he thinks are important articles for teachers and administrators to read and ponder. Moreover, he is a graceful writer.

In this issue of the “Marshall Memo,” he has taken a scholarly article from the Review of Educational Research about teachers resisting mandated curriculum and materials. He summarizes the piece crisply, making it accessible to a wider audience than would usually read this academic journal.

That some teachers push back against a required curriculum is not news to veterans of the classroom. Why they do and how they adapt mandated lessons, however, offers important insights into classroom lessons particularly teacher flexibility and resilience.

In this Review of Educational Research article, Andrew Huddleston (Abilene Christian University) and four colleagues report on their study of the ways that some teachers engage in “principled resistance” to implementing mandated materials. An example: a teacher believed the highly scripted Open Court curriculum didn’t meet her students’ cultural and individual needs and implemented a creative literature-based curriculum with extensive student writing. Despite her kids scoring well on state tests, the teacher’s contract was not renewed because she wasn’t a team player; she left the profession.

            “Although we greatly empathize with the teachers in this review who engaged in acts of principled resistance,” say Huddleston et al., “we are not advocates for an anarchical approach in which teachers do whatever they want for any reason. We recognize that even within a student-centered classroom, direct instruction still has a place, and a provided curriculum can be helpful, especially for new teachers.” Indeed, research has shown that a “guaranteed and viable curriculum” correlates with student achievement, and aligning curriculum across classrooms and grades can be part of an effective strategy for equitable student learning. On the other hand, test prep and rigid curriculum mandates can actually make test scores go down.

            With those caveats, the researchers explore the literature on principled resistance and identify three reasons some teachers resist curriculum mandates, with an example for each:

• Social justice – Three bilingual teachers felt that monolingual instruction wasn’t meeting the needs of their emerging bilingual students and advocated with their colleagues on the importance of a 50/50 biliteracy approach. In another instance, high-school social studies teachers advocated for a justice-oriented ethnic studies curriculum focused on the surrounding community. 

• Students’ needs not being met – A teacher implementing the Lucy Calkins Units of Study curriculum believed the writing prompts were contrived and artificial, and she found ways to spark students’ writing ideas through conversations with each other. 

• Culturally responsive pedagogy – Two urban fifth-grade teachers objected to the test prep toolkit they were required to use and implemented a culturally responsive interdisciplinary unit that made connections to students’ lived experience. 

From their review of numerous studies, Huddleston and his co-authors describe these “models of resistance” used by teachers who have issues with curriculum materials:

–   Strategic compliance – they go along while believing their students aren’t served well.

–   Compliance with frustration – teachers are deeply unhappy but feel powerless to resist.

–   Compliance with complaint – they voice their concerns but aren’t listened to.

–   Resisting covertly – behind closed doors, teachers supplement or alter the material.

–   Strategic compromise – they use parts of the required curriculum but not others.

–   Adjusting pacing – teachers make changes in how time is allotted.

–   Rearranging – they change the sequence and substance to align with their beliefs. 

–   Supplementing – teachers add materials and techniques they believe are necessary.

–   Omitting – they skip certain elements and substitute their own ideas.

–   Hybridizing – teachers blend their own ideas with the required curriculum.

–   Persuading – they make the case for different materials to colleagues and leaders.

–   Going public – teachers use social media to try to influence parents and policymakers.

–   Collective action – they rally others to opt out of curriculum or testing.

–   Overt and outright rejection – teachers refuse to implement test prep or materials.

–   Forced to leave – as in the case above, a contract is not renewed or the teacher is fired.

–   Transferring – teachers move to a school with a more-sympatico curriculum. 

–   Leaving teaching – they decide the struggle is not worth it and change profession.

Did these forms of teacher pushback – from grudging compliance to putting their jobs on the line – result in better student outcomes? Unfortunately, say Huddleston et al., “none of the studies we located compared the student performance of teachers who resisted curricular mandates with those who did not.” It’s possible, they say, that some of the changes teachers made did more harm than good. Clearly more research is needed because in some cases, the opposite occurs: teachers persuade school leaders to make changes that improve student achievement. 

In the meantime, what are the implications of this study for school leaders? One guiding principle, say Huddleston et al., is watching for situations where teachers make the case for adaptations that are within the spirit and intent of a curriculum. “Being faithful to the purpose of a program,” they say, “addresses the need for a schoolwide focus and cohesion while at the same time carving out space for teacher discretion, decision-making, and necessary modification.” 

            The big questions raised by this study: what’s best for students, how that’s measured, and who gets to decide. “Principled resistance,” say Huddleston et al., “is not laziness, stubbornness, or resistance to change,” but teachers who believe a mandated curriculum is harmful won’t help their students by suffering in silence or quitting. They’re most likely to improve things for students when they join with colleagues and make the case for curriculum changes that improve not only test scores but also students’ deeper learning and future well-being. 

The article closes with a quote from Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of concerned citizens can make a difference. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

_____________________________

“Teachers’ Principled Resistance to Curricular Control: A Theoretical Literature Review” by Andrew Huddleston, Stephanie Talley, Sara Edgington, Emily Colwell, and Allison Dale in Review of Educational Research, December 2025 (Vol. 95, #6, pp. 1213-1250); Huddleston can be reached at [email protected].