teachers – Mike Paul

Yes, We Need to Get Rid of AP Courses

classmates doing studies for exam together — Photo by Armin Rimoldi on Pexels.com

And the College Board’s recent score inflation just made the argument stronger.

There, I said it. Let me make the case.

I’ve worked in public education long enough to watch AP courses go from a program for genuinely advanced students to a college admissions arms race to, now, something so thoroughly gamed by the College Board itself that universities are quietly questioning whether AP scores mean anything at all. We have spent the better part of two decades pushing AP as an equity solution — offering the best, most rigorous content to every student, regardless of background. That framing is correct. The vehicle we chose to deliver it is wrong.

Let me explain why, and what we should do instead.

The Equity Problem Has Never Been Solved

The original argument for expanding AP access was simple and appealing: if we give more students — low-income students, students of color, first-generation college students — access to rigorous coursework, we close the opportunity gap. More challenge equals better preparation equals better outcomes.

The data has never supported this at scale. A 2023 New York Times investigation found that roughly 60 percent of AP exams taken by low-income students scored too low for college credit — a 1 or 2 out of 5 — and that this number has barely moved in twenty years. Two decades of expanded access. Same failure rate. That’s not a pipeline problem. That’s a systemic problem with the model.

The barriers are layered and often invisible. Nationally, about 30 percent of Black and Hispanic students enrolled in AP courses never take the corresponding exam at all, compared to roughly 15 percent of Asian students. The reasons aren’t mysterious: scheduling conflicts, unofficial prerequisites, being steered toward “more appropriate” classes by counselors who read demographics rather than ability. Getting into the course doesn’t mean the course is actually accessible — or that success in it is equitably distributed.

This is the AP equity promise: a credential that most of the students it’s supposed to serve can’t access in any meaningful way.

The College Board’s Response: Change the Score, Not the System

Here’s where the story gets genuinely infuriating. After that NYT investigation put the failure rates for low-income and minority students into the national conversation, the College Board didn’t redesign courses, improve teacher training, or address structural barriers to preparation. They changed the scoring.

In 2022, the College Board quietly introduced what it calls “Evidence-Based Standard Setting” — a new methodology for scoring its most popular AP exams. The results were extraordinary, in the worst possible way.

AP U.S. History: students earning 4s and 5s jumped from 25 percent in 2023 to 46 percent in 2024. AP U.S. Government and Politics: top scores leapt from 24 percent to 49 percent in a single year. AP English Literature’s pass rate went from 44 percent in 2021 to 78 percent in 2022, the first year EBSS was applied.

Were students suddenly twice as prepared? Were teachers twice as effective? Did something happen in American high schools that would justify this kind of jump in a single year — while NAEP scores in 8th grade math and reading continued to decline and PISA scores showed stagnation or decline for American 15-year-olds?

No. The College Board changed the scoring system under pressure, and more students passed because passing got easier.

The financial context matters here. In 2024, over 86 percent of College Board revenue came from fees — nearly half of that from the basic AP exam fee alone. More than 1.3 million students paid $99 per exam for over 4.8 million AP exams in 2025. Total revenues exceeded $1.17 billion, and the organization held reserves of over $2 billion. The CEO received $2.3 million in total compensation in 2024 — comparable to the president of Stanford, whose institution operates on a budget roughly ten times larger.

The College Board has a direct financial incentive to keep AP attractive to students. If competitors like dual enrollment are growing, AP scores need to look competitive. The solution they chose wasn’t to improve the product. It was to make the grades better. Some elite universities are now quietly developing their own assessments to supplement AP data, having lost confidence in what AP scores actually signal.

What AP Courses Actually Do — and Don’t Do

Here’s the core problem, and it isn’t really about the College Board’s financial incentives, though those matter. It’s about what AP courses were designed to accomplish and what we’ve asked them to do instead.

AP courses were designed as an exam-prep system. The course exists to prepare students for the AP test. The test exists so students can demonstrate college-level knowledge and potentially earn college credit. That’s the whole loop. There’s nothing in that loop about authentic inquiry, personalized learning, or developing the kind of curiosity and self-direction that actually prepares people for college and life.

I’ve seen good teachers do extraordinary things inside AP courses. The structure doesn’t prevent great teaching — it just doesn’t require it, reward it, or build toward it. What it requires is covering the material on the exam. And teachers in underfunded schools, with overcrowded classrooms, serving students who haven’t had the preparation advantages their suburban peers have had, are left trying to jam college-level content into students who are already behind — while the clock ticks toward the May exam.

This is what we’ve decided counts as equity.

No one takes an AP course because it sounds exciting. Students take it because they need the credential, the weighted GPA boost, or the college credit — in roughly that order of priority. The course has become a box to check in a game nobody designed for the students who need the most from their education.

The Alternative That’s Already Working

Here’s what the advocates of the current system don’t want to talk about: dual enrollment is quietly eating AP’s lunch, and for good reason.

Dual enrollment allows high school students to take actual college courses — usually through community colleges or state universities — and earn real, transferable college credits before they graduate. Not maybe-credits that depend on a May exam score. Actual college credits that appear on an actual college transcript.

The numbers tell the story. In the 2024-25 school year, an estimated 2.8 million high school students were enrolled in dual enrollment courses — up from 2.5 million just two years earlier. Ninety percent of U.S. high schools now offer dual enrollment as of 2026. Studies consistently show that dual enrollment students are more likely to complete a bachelor’s degree, and the effect is particularly pronounced for first-generation college students.

Dual enrollment has real limitations. Quality varies by institution. Credit transfer isn’t guaranteed everywhere, particularly at highly selective universities. Some rural districts struggle with access to college partners. These are real problems worth solving.

But the structural difference matters enormously: in dual enrollment, the credit is earned by doing the work, not by performing on a single high-stakes exam in May. For students who’ve struggled all year and finally understood the material in April, AP rewards the exam. Dual enrollment rewards the semester.

What I Actually Want

I’m not just interested in replacing one credential with another. The deeper argument isn’t that dual enrollment is perfect — it’s that the entire framing of AP as an equity solution has distracted us from the real work.

The real work is redesigning Tier 1 instruction in every classroom for every student.

Not advanced placement for some. Not rigor for those who can access it through the right course label. Authentic, engaging, challenging learning environments for all students — where the goal isn’t coverage for an exam, but genuine intellectual development. Where teachers are supported and trained to create learning experiences that develop curiosity, critical thinking, and the capacity to learn independently. Where students who need more support get more support rather than being filtered into different tracks based on teacher recommendations and parental advocacy.

AP courses didn’t create tracking. But they reinforce it, give it a credential, and let us feel like we’ve addressed equity when the data says we haven’t.

As an instructional coach, I’ve watched schools celebrate expanding AP enrollment while the students enrolled in those courses received content coverage without the preparation, context, or support that would make it meaningful. The number of AP course offerings became a proxy for school quality. The number of students enrolled became a proxy for equity. The pass rates told a different story that nobody wanted to hear.

The College Board’s recent decision to fix that story by softening the scoring didn’t solve the problem. It made it harder to see.

The Hard Conversation

I know this argument is unpopular in certain circles. Parents who have watched their children use AP courses to build transcripts and earn college credit have real, concrete reasons to value the system. Teachers who’ve designed genuinely excellent AP courses have real, legitimate grievances with the suggestion that the whole structure should go.

I’m not saying those courses aren’t valuable. I’m saying the architecture around them — the College Board’s monopoly, the single high-stakes exam as the sole measure of learning, the financial incentives that led to score inflation, the equity promise that was never delivered — is worth being honest about.

We can do better. We should demand better. And the first step is being willing to say that a system that has failed its stated purpose for twenty years doesn’t deserve another twenty years of the benefit of the doubt.

Related on this site: The problem with The Anxious Generation and the “ban all screens” movement — a related argument about how education policy gets driven by compelling narratives rather than honest data.

The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!

2,178 Digitized Occult Books: Strange Treasures for Authentic Learning

I want to tell you about a library in Amsterdam housed in a 17th-century building called the House with the Heads, funded in part by the author of The Da Vinci Code, with a collection that was granted UNESCO Memory of the World status in 2022, and whose digital archive you can browse for free from your couch right now.

The Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica — the Ritman Library, now housed at the Embassy of the Free Mind — contains roughly 30,000 titles on Western esotericism, mysticism, alchemy, astrology, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and related traditions. In 2018, after Dan Brown donated €300,000 to fund the digitization project (he’d visited the library multiple times while researching The Lost Symbol and Inferno), the library launched what they called, with genuine wit, Hermetically Open: a free, publicly accessible digital archive of its rarest pre-1900 texts. As of 2025, 2,178 books are fully scanned and available online.

The collection includes the Corpus Hermeticum from 1472, Giordano Bruno’s work from 1584, the first printed visual representation of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life from 1516, alchemical manuscripts with intricate hand-drawn diagrams, and hundreds of texts in Latin, Dutch, German, French, and English that blur every boundary we’ve drawn between science, philosophy, theology, medicine, and magic.

My first thought when I found this collection was: this is exactly what I want students to encounter.

Why “Occult” Is the Wrong Frame for This

The word does its work on us. “Occult” conjures Halloween aesthetics and conspiracy theories, and it’s easy to dismiss the whole thing as fringe material with no serious application in a classroom.

That reaction, though, says more about our current assumptions about knowledge than it says about these texts.

For several centuries of Western intellectual history, there was no clean dividing line between alchemy and chemistry, between astrology and astronomy, between hermetic philosophy and natural science. Isaac Newton — who gave us calculus, the laws of motion, and the theory of universal gravitation — spent at least as much of his intellectual energy on alchemy and Biblical prophecy as he did on physics. His alchemical manuscripts are available online too, through Cambridge’s digital library. The man who arguably launched the scientific revolution was also, by any contemporary definition, deeply engaged in occult practice.

This isn’t an embarrassing footnote. It’s actually essential context for understanding how scientific knowledge develops — through the messy, often wrong, often ideologically entangled process of humans trying to make sense of the world with the conceptual tools they have available. The Ritman collection is a primary source archive for that story.

As a doctoral student who has spent years reading about how knowledge is constructed, organized, and transmitted, I find this collection genuinely thrilling. These books are where the medieval and the modern collide. They’re where you can see what people got wrong and what they got surprisingly right, often in the same text, often for reasons that have nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with the conceptual frameworks available to them.

That’s exactly what I want students to sit with.

What Makes This Useful for Teachers

The collection isn’t neat. It’s multilingual, dense, and built for scholars. That’s part of the point — it’s not pre-digested curriculum content, it’s actual historical material that requires work to interpret. For teachers who believe students should wrestle with primary sources rather than always receiving polished summaries of them, this is a goldmine.

A few ways I’d use this across disciplines:

History and Social Studies — Trace how alchemy became chemistry. Look at how astrology shaped political decisions in early modern Europe. Ask students why the intellectual tradition represented here was systematically excluded from what we now call the history of science, and what that exclusion says about how we decide what counts as legitimate knowledge.

English and Literature — The visual and linguistic strangeness of these texts is remarkable. The archaic spellings, the “long s” that looks like an f, the allegorical imagery, the blend of Latin and vernacular — all of it offers material for close reading and for connecting to the Gothic, Romantic, and magical realist traditions that drew heavily from this well.

Science — Contrast alchemical “recipes” with modern chemical procedures. Examine how flawed models of the cosmos were still generative — the people using them weren’t stupid, they were working at the edge of what was knowable. What does that say about our own current models?

Art and Design — The illuminated manuscripts and alchemical diagrams in this collection are extraordinary visual objects. The symbolic language is dense and codified and genuinely beautiful. There’s serious material here for design history, visual communication, and semiotics.

Philosophy — The Hermetic tradition represents a sustained attempt to synthesize Greek philosophy, early Christian theology, Jewish mysticism, and natural observation into a unified account of reality. That synthesis didn’t work out the way its practitioners hoped. But the attempt itself raises questions about knowledge, interpretation, and the limits of any single framework for understanding the world — questions that don’t go away.

The cross-disciplinary angle is what I find most powerful. One of the things that frustrated me most in my years as an educator before moving into instructional coaching is how thoroughly we’ve siloed knowledge. Students take chemistry, history, and English as separate things, as if the history of chemistry weren’t fascinating, as if the literary history of science didn’t exist. The Ritman collection doesn’t respect those boundaries because it predates our drawing of them.

The Resource

The collection is free, fully accessible online, and searchable — though the search interface takes some patience. The direct link to the digital catalog is here. I’d recommend starting with the “Digital collection” page, which gives you some orientation before you dive in.

A few things worth knowing:

The majority of texts are in Latin, Dutch, German, or French. English-language texts exist, but aren’t the majority. For classroom use, this is actually an opportunity — translation, context-building, and working with unfamiliar material are valuable skills.
The image quality varies, but the rare and fragile items were prioritized for digitization, so many of the most valuable texts are well scanned.
The broader collection, which includes 30,000 titles and continues to grow, is housed at the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam. If you’re ever there, it’s worth visiting.

The collection earned UNESCO Memory of the World status in 2022, a designation UNESCO does not hand out lightly. This is genuinely important cultural heritage, now freely available to anyone with internet access. That’s remarkable.

Dan Brown’s novels that led him to the Ritman Library — The Lost Symbol and Inferno — both draw heavily on the kind of Hermetic and esoteric tradition documented in this collection. If you want a somewhat lurid but surprisingly well-researched tour of the ideas, they’re a decent starting point. Brown is not a subtle writer, but he did his homework.

Related on this site: the AI books post covers how knowledge evolves and what it means to think critically about the tools we use — a thread that runs directly through what this collection makes visible.

What If Every Teacher Could Build an AI Tutor? David Wiley’s Generative Textbooks Idea Is Worth Your Attention

There’s a particular kind of idea that shows up in education technology every few years — one that sounds almost too obvious once you hear it, but that nobody had quite put together that way before. David Wiley‘s work on generative textbooks is one such idea.

I’ve been following Wiley for a long time. If you’ve ever used an open textbook in a course or benefited from freely available educational materials online, there’s a good chance his fingerprints are on the infrastructure that made that possible. He’s one of the founders of the open educational resources movement — the effort to create, share, and freely adapt teaching and learning materials under open licenses. It’s unglamorous, important work that has saved students billions of dollars in textbook costs and given teachers genuine tools they can actually modify.

So when Wiley started applying that same philosophy to AI, I paid attention.

The Problem He’s Solving

The standard AI-in-education conversation goes like this: here are some tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, take your pick), and here are some ways teachers can use them. The tools belong to the companies. The teachers are users. If the company changes pricing, changes policy, or shuts down, the teacher starts over.

Wiley’s question is different: what if the instructional logic — the pedagogical intelligence built into an AI learning experience — belonged to the teacher? What if any educator could author an AI-powered learning tool without writing code, without a budget, and without surrendering control to a platform?

That’s what generative textbooks are attempting to answer.

How It Actually Works

The architecture is simpler than it sounds. A generative textbook isn’t a document — it’s a structured collection of inputs that, when assembled, tell an AI model exactly how to behave as a learning tool for a specific subject.

Here’s what an author creates:

A book-level prompt stub — the template that sets the AI’s voice, tone, format, and overall behavior. Think of this as the personality and ground rules of the learning experience.
Learning objectives — one per chapter or topic, short statements about what a learner should understand or be able to do.
Topic summaries — accurate, context-rich summaries written for the AI, not for students. These are what the model uses to stay grounded in accurate content rather than hallucinating.
Activity templates — the types of interactions available: flashcards, explanations, quiz questions, Socratic dialogue, whatever the author builds in.

When a student picks a topic and an activity type, the system assembles the relevant pieces into a single prompt and sends it to the language model, which generates a fresh, tailored learning experience — not retrieved from a database, but generated in the moment based on the author’s pedagogical structure.

As Wiley puts it: in this model, prompt engineering is instructional design. The authoring isn’t code — it’s curriculum work. That’s a meaningful distinction for teachers.

The Clever Pivot on Cost

The original prototype sent prompts through an API to open-weight language models hosted on Groq. Clean, seamless, technically elegant. Also not free — API calls cost money at scale, and Wiley found that most educators he consulted weren’t particularly concerned with whether the underlying model was “open” in the ideological sense. They were concerned with whether it was free for students.

So he made a pragmatic call: rather than routing prompts through a back-end service, the tool now assembles the prompt and copies it to the student’s clipboard. The student pastes it into whatever AI interface they already have access to — ChatGPT’s free tier, Gemini, a school-licensed model, whatever.

This is inelegant in the user-experience sense. There’s a copy-paste step that breaks the flow. Analytics become difficult. Student privacy depends on whatever tool they choose to use. Wiley is honest about all of this — he describes the project explicitly as a tech demonstration, not a finished product.

But there’s something worth noticing in the pragmatism. The decision prioritizes actual access over technical elegance. For students in districts that can’t afford platform licenses and teachers who don’t control their school’s technology budget, a tool that works with the free tier of a consumer AI product is more useful than a seamless experience behind a paywall.

Where Wiley Has Taken This Since

The generative textbook prototype was a starting point, and Wiley has kept building. His more recent thinking has evolved toward what he calls OELMs — Open Educational Language Models — a framework that combines open-licensed content with AI in a more sophisticated way.

The key addition is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): rather than just grounding the AI’s behavior in a few paragraph-length topic summaries, an OELM includes a curated collection of OER content that the model actively retrieves from when generating responses. This makes the outputs more accurate, more traceable to specific source materials, and more trustworthy for educational use — one of the genuine limitations of relying on a general-purpose language model that might confabulate confidently.

The broader argument Wiley is making — that generative AI is the logical successor to OER — is worth sitting with. His claim isn’t that AI replaces open textbooks, but that the principles that made OER valuable (open licensing, participatory creation, the ability to adapt and remix) need to be extended into the AI space. As the educational materials market shifts toward AI-powered products, the question of who owns the instructional logic matters enormously for equity and access.

What This Means for Teachers

I want to be careful not to oversell where this project currently is. The generative textbooks site is live and explorable, but this is genuinely early-stage work. The copy-paste workflow has real friction. The quality of the learning experience depends heavily on the quality of the inputs a teacher creates, which means the authoring itself requires genuine pedagogical thought — garbage in, garbage out applies acutely here.

But the underlying question Wiley is raising is one I think about a lot as an instructional coach: who gets to design the learning experience, and on whose terms?

The dominant model in AI-powered education right now is platform-centric. A company builds an AI tool, schools license it, teachers become users. This mirrors exactly what happened with traditional educational technology — districts buy the LMS, teachers work inside it, the pedagogical architecture belongs to the vendor. We know how that story tends to go: cost escalation, lock-in, tools that don’t quite fit what teachers actually need because they were designed generically.

Wiley’s generative textbooks project is asking whether there’s another path — one where educators are architects rather than users. Where the instructional intelligence lives in open, adaptable, teacher-created structures rather than in proprietary platforms. Where a teacher in a school with limited resources can build a learning tool that’s as good as anything a well-funded district is paying for.

That’s not a modest ambition. And it’s not finished yet. But it’s the kind of work that tends to matter more than it seems to when it starts.

Go explore:

generativetextbooks.org — the live tool, free to explore
Wiley’s original post on the idea — where this started
His thinking on OELMs — where it’s going
His blog at opencontent.org — ongoing thinking on OER, AI, and the intersection

Related reading: my AI books post covers Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence, which has useful framing for educators thinking about AI as a co-teacher rather than a replacement — a theme that runs directly through Wiley’s work.

Book Review: The Shift to Student-Led by Catlin Tucker & Katie Novak

Reimagining the Classroom: The Shift to Student-Led with UDL & Blended Learning — Version 1.0.0

Here’s the thing nobody in education wants to say out loud: a significant portion of what we call “teaching” is actually just teachers doing the work that students should be doing.

Teachers write the summaries. Teachers generate the discussion questions. Teachers create the study materials. Teachers provide all the feedback. Teachers design all the reflection prompts. And then we wonder why students are passive, why engagement is low, and why teachers are burning out at alarming rates.

The Shift to Student-Led: Reimagining Classroom Workflows with UDL and Blended Learning by Catlin Tucker and Katie Novak is a direct response to this problem. As an instructional coach, I find myself recommending this book regularly — not because it’s revelatory, but because it articulates something that’s very hard to put into words in a 50-minute faculty meeting and then hands you tools to actually do something about it.

What the Book Is Actually About

Tucker and Novak are explicit about their starting point: they’ve worked with too many exhausted teachers. The context is post-pandemic education, where teachers who were already stretched thin absorbed years of additional uncertainty, disruption, and grief — and are now expected to simply resume as if none of that happened. The book isn’t optimistic about the status quo. It explicitly states that the current model isn’t sustainable and makes a structural argument for why.

The structural argument is this: when teachers are the primary workers in a classroom — the ones generating content, facilitating discussion, providing feedback, assessing progress — they create passive learners and exhausted professionals. The labor is distributed entirely wrong. Students are spectators in their own education, and teachers do a job that can’t be done by one person for 30 students without someone getting shortchanged. Usually, someone is the teacher.

The solution Tucker and Novak offer is to redistribute that labor through what they call student-led workflows — specific, structured shifts that move each of those teacher-dominated tasks back to students. Ten shifts in total, one per chapter, each paired with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles and blended learning strategies that make the shift manageable across a diverse classroom.

UDL and Blended Learning — Why These Two

The combination isn’t arbitrary. UDL addresses the persistent challenge of designing learning for the full range of students in a classroom without creating 30 different lesson plans. Its core principle — build flexibility and choice into the design from the start rather than retrofitting accommodations afterward — directly enables student agency. When multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression are built in, students can direct more of their learning because the options are available.

Blended learning addresses the logistics. Technology, when used intentionally, creates the structures that enable student-led workflows at scale. Not technology as a substitute for teaching, but technology as the infrastructure that lets students access content, track their own progress, collaborate asynchronously, and document their thinking in ways that a purely analog classroom can’t sustain.

Neither of these ideas is new. What Tucker and Novak do is show specifically how they work together to shift who does the work, which is a more practical frame than either concept provides on its own.

The Ten Shifts

The book’s ten workflows move through five areas: lessons, assessments, practice, feedback, and discussions. In each area, Tucker and Novak show what the teacher-led version looks like, what problems it creates, what the research suggests, and what a student-led version looks like with concrete examples and implementation tools.

A few that land particularly well in the coaching conversations I have:

From teacher-provided feedback to student self-assessment. This is the shift most teachers resist hardest, and most students need most. The book makes a compelling case that waiting for teacher feedback creates learned helplessness — students who can’t evaluate their own work are dependent on external validation in ways that don’t serve them in college, career, or life. The practical tools for building student capacity to assess their own work are among the most immediately usable in the book.

From teacher-led discussion to student-facilitated conversation. Whole-class discussions in which the teacher asks questions and students respond are a remarkably inefficient way to build thinking. Tucker and Novak offer structures — including protocols that can run entirely without teacher direction — that shift the facilitation to students. This one requires patience to implement; students who have been in teacher-led discussions their whole lives don’t immediately know how to facilitate for each other. But the payoff is substantial.

From teacher-created practice to peer-generated learning resources. When students create flashcards, summaries, or quiz questions for each other, they’re doing the cognitive work that actually builds retention. The teacher’s job shifts from resource creator to quality reviewer, which is a genuinely different and more sustainable role.

What It Gets Right

The book earns its positive reputation with practitioners primarily because it doesn’t just describe what student-led learning looks like — it walks through the implementation with enough specificity to actually try it. The templates and protocols are real, the scenarios are recognizable, and Tucker and Novak are honest that these shifts take time and that students will push back initially because passive learning is more comfortable in the short term.

The framing of teacher sustainability is also well handled. This isn’t positioned as “here’s how to do more for students” — it’s positioned as “here’s how to stop doing work that isn’t yours to do,” which is a meaningfully different message for a profession that has normalized unsustainable self-sacrifice.

What to Watch For

A couple of honest caveats from the coaching side of this.

The book is designed primarily for secondary and post-secondary classrooms, though the principles extend further. Elementary teachers will find more adaptation required.

As with most professional development books, the gap between reading the ideas and actually implementing them in the classroom is real. The templates help, but student-led workflows require significant upfront investment in building the routines and student capacity that make them work. The book is clear about this, but it’s easy to underestimate when reading.

And the blended learning components assume a level of access to technology and reliability that isn’t universal. The ideas hold without the technology, but the specific digital strategies require some translation for under-resourced classrooms.

Who Should Read This

Teachers who feel like they’re carrying their classrooms on their backs — this book is written directly for you, and the framing will be immediately recognizable.

Instructional coaches supporting teachers in designing more student-centered practice — I’d use this as a book study anchor and the companion resources as coaching tools.

School leaders thinking about what sustainable teaching practice actually looks like — the structural argument in the opening chapters is worth your time, even if you don’t go chapter by chapter through the workflows.

Get The Shift to Student-Led

Free resources from the authors:

Related on this site: the free play and Peter Gray post makes a parallel argument about who does the work of learning — and what happens to kids when adults take over tasks that should belong to them.

AI Schools and the Illusion of Efficiency

close up photo of an abstract art — Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Pexels.com

A recent investigation into Alpha School, a high-tuition “AI-powered” private school, revealed faulty AI-generated lessons, hallucinated questions, scraped curriculum materials, and heavy student surveillance. Former employees described students as “guinea pigs.”

That’s the headline.

But the real issue isn’t whether one school deployed AI sloppily.

The real issue is whether we are confusing technological acceleration with educational progress.

The Seduction of the Two-Hour School Day

Alpha’s pitch is simple and powerful: compress academic learning into two hyper-efficient hours using AI tutors, then free the rest of the day for creativity and passion projects.

If you believe traditional schooling wastes time, that promise is intoxicating.

But here’s the problem:

Efficiency is not the same thing as development.

From a Science of Learning and Development (SoLD) perspective, learning is not merely the transmission of content. It is a process that integrates cognition, emotion, identity, and social context. Durable learning requires safety, belonging, agency, and meaning-making.

You cannot compress belonging into a two-hour block.

You cannot automate identity formation.

And you cannot hallucinate your way to deep understanding.

Connectivism Is Not Automation

Some defenders of AI-heavy schooling argue that we are simply witnessing the next phase of networked learning. Knowledge is distributed. AI becomes a node in the network. Personalized pathways replace one-size-fits-all instruction.

That language sounds connectivist.

But Connectivism is not about replacing human nodes with machine ones.

It concerns the expansion of networks of meaning.

In a connectivist system:

Learning happens across relationships.
Knowledge flows through dynamic connections.
Judgment matters more than memorization.
Pattern recognition and critical filtering are essential skills.

AI can participate in that network.

But when AI becomes the primary instructional authority — generating content, generating assessments, evaluating its own outputs — the network collapses into a closed loop.

AI checking AI is not distributed intelligence.

It is recursive automation.

Connectivism requires diversity of nodes.

Not monoculture.

Surveillance Is Not Personalization

The investigation also described extensive monitoring: screen recording, webcam footage, mouse tracking, and behavioral nudges.

This is framed as personalization.

It is not.

It is optimization.

SoLD research clarifies that psychological safety and autonomy are foundational to learning. When students feel constantly watched, agency erodes. Compliance increases. Anxiety increases.

You can nudge behavior with surveillance.

You cannot cultivate intrinsic motivation that way.

If our model of learning begins to resemble corporate productivity software, we should pause.

Education is not a workflow dashboard.

The Hidden Variable: Selection Bias

To be fair, Alpha School reportedly produces strong test scores.

However, high-tuition schools serve families with financial, cultural, and educational capital. Research consistently shows that standardized test performance correlates strongly with income.

If affluent students succeed in an AI-heavy environment, that does not prove that the AI caused the success.

It may simply mean the students would succeed almost anywhere. I often say those students would succeed with a ham sandwich for a teacher.

The question is not whether AI can serve already advantaged learners.

The question is whether AI, deployed without deep pedagogical grounding, strengthens or weakens human development.

The Real Design Question

The danger is not AI itself.

The danger is designing educational systems around what AI does well.

AI does well at:

Drafting content
Generating practice questions
Scaling feedback
Recognizing surface patterns

AI does not do well at:

Reading emotional context
Building trust
Modeling intellectual humility
Navigating moral ambiguity
Forming identity

SoLD reminds us that learning is relational and developmental.

Connectivism reminds us that learning is networked and distributed.

If we optimize for what AI does well and marginalize what humans do uniquely well, we create a system that is efficient — but thin.

Fast — but shallow.

Impressive — but fragile.

What This Means for Public Education

This story is not merely about a private school engaging in aggressive experimentation.

It is a preview.

Every district will face pressure to:

Automate instruction
Replace textbooks with AI tutors
Compress seat time
Increase data capture

The answer cannot be a blanket rejection.

Nor can it be an uncritical adoption.

The answer is design discipline.

We should use AI to:

Reduce administrative drag
Prototype lessons
Support differentiated feedback
Expand access to expertise

But we should anchor every AI decision in two non-negotiables:

Does this strengthen human relationships?
Does this expand student agency and meaning-making?

If the answer is no, we are not innovating.

We are optimizing the wrong variable.

The Choice in Front of Us

We stand at a fork.

We can design AI systems around human development.

Or we can redesign human development around AI systems.

One path amplifies Connectivism, relational trust, and whole-child growth.

The other path creates compliant, monitored, hyper-efficient learners who score well but lack deep agency.

Technology will not make that choice for us.

We will.

The Building is Closed, The Vibe is Open

The first great snowstorm of 2026 hit Kentucky last week and sent many schools either to pure snow days or Non-Traditional Instruction (NTI) days. So, I spent most of last week sitting at my desk, unshowered, unshaved, and low-key fiending for in-person human interactions.

Doing my best to keep spirits up, I put together a quick playlist with some of my late-70s baby post-punk/new wave goodness and shared it with my teachers.

The reviews were overwhelmingly positive.

Engagement Is the Outcome, Not the Goal

For years, we’ve treated engagement like something teachers should be able to manufacture on demand.

If students aren’t engaged, the assumption is often that the lesson wasn’t exciting enough, interactive enough, or energetic enough. So we add activities. We add movement. We add tools. We add noise.

And then we’re surprised when it still doesn’t work.

Here’s the hard truth I’ve learned as an instructional coach:

Engagement isn’t something you plan for. It’s something you earn.

Why Planning for Engagement Often Backfires

When engagement becomes the primary goal of lesson planning, we usually end up designing around surface-level behaviors:

Are students busy?
Are they moving?
Are they talking?
Are they smiling?

But none of those things guarantees learning.

In fact, classrooms can look highly engaged while very little meaningful thinking is happening. Students comply. They complete. They perform school.

And teachers feel frustrated because they did everything “right.”

What the Research Actually Tells Us

Research connected to the Science of Learning and Development (SoLD) consistently points to the same conclusion:

Engagement follows meaning.

Students are more likely to engage when:

The task feels relevant to their lives or the world around them
They have some sense of ownership or choice
The thinking required actually matters

When those conditions are present, engagement emerges naturally. When they’re missing, no amount of energy can save the lesson.

This is why gimmicks don’t scale—and why they exhaust teachers.

Shifting the Planning Question

Instead of starting with:

“How do I make this engaging?”

Try starting with:

“Why would this matter to a student?”

That single question forces a different kind of design thinking:

What problem is being explored?
What decisions are students being asked to make?
Who or what is this work for?
Where does student thinking actually show up?

When lessons are built around those questions, engagement becomes a byproduct—not a burden.

What This Means for Teachers

This shift doesn’t require abandoning structure, rigor, or content. It requires recentering the work on meaningful thinking rather than performance.

It also reduces burnout.

When students carry more cognitive load, teachers don’t have to bring all the energy. The work itself does more of the heavy lifting.

That’s not about doing less—it’s about doing different.

A Coaching Note from the Field

When teachers tell me, “My students just aren’t engaged,” my response is rarely about strategies.

It’s usually about the task.

Fix the task, and engagement often surprises you.

If this way of thinking resonates, I write a short weekly newsletter for teachers and instructional leaders focused on authentic learning, instructional coaching, and designing school in ways that actually work.

No spam. No gimmicks. Just clear thinking from the field.

You can subscribe here.

MP Daily Telegraph: October 15, 2025

The Atlantic Telegraph 1866 via Internet Archive

Illustrative Math’s CEO on What Went Wrong in NYC and Why Pre-K Math is Up Next – Illustrative Mathematics created a K-12 math curriculum used in many U.S. schools, but its rollout in New York City faced challenges due to implementation issues. The curriculum encourages students to think about problems before teachers explain solutions, blending direct teaching with student exploration. The organization is now focusing on early math by developing a pre-K curriculum to help students succeed from the start.
Mark Rober’s underwater search for a flooded Gold Rush mining town – (This is so FREAKING cool) Mark Rober used sonar and a small submarine to search for a flooded Gold Rush town under Folsom Lake in California. The town was covered by water after a dam was built in 1955. Despite challenges, the team found interesting shapes and objects on the lakebed.
D’Angelo: 14 Essential Songs – D’Angelo was a talented soul singer, songwriter, and producer known for his unique style and deep musicianship. He released three important albums blending soul, funk, jazz, and hip-hop, influencing the neo-soul movement. Despite personal struggles, his music remains powerful and full of emotion, exploring love, pain, and social issues.

A Quick Zine Resource Guide for Teachers

I’ve been on a zine kick for a while now, and recently had the chance to walk teachers through making their first zine.

We worked on creating their own zines, which was fun and made many of them uncomfortable, which is perfectly OK. I compiled some quick links and information, and we discussed potential ideas they might consider and run with when working with students.

Oh, and here’s the zine I made during one of the sessions. Feel free to use it to introduce the idea of zines to your peers and admin.

Download the Zine About Zines

What Is a Zine?

A zine (short for “magazine” or “fanzine”) is a small-circulation, self-published work, often made by hand, that can take many forms—comics, essays, art, collages, instructions, etc.
Because zines are informal, tactile, and often DIY, they offer a low-stakes way for students to share voice, experiment with layout or narrative, and synthesize content in creative formats.
Zines are used in classrooms to teach skills such as media literacy, personal narrative, research synthesis, visual thinking, and more.
- https://guides.library.illinois.edu/zines/classroom
- https://www.zinelibraries.info/running-a-zine-library/teaching-with-zines/

Folding a Zine — The One-Sheet Method

One of the simplest and most powerful forms is the one-sheet zine (fold, cut, fill).

Tools, Templates & Digital Zine Options

Resource	What It Offers	Link / Notes
Zine-O-Sphere	Substack exploring zines, art, culture, and DIY publishing.	https://abigailschleifer.substack.com/s/zine-o-sphere
“Using Zines in the Classroom and How to Make a Single Page Booklet Zine” (OER)	Includes guidance + printable master flat for one-page zines	CUNY Academic Works
SCU Library’s Zine Guide	Walkthroughs for physical & digital zines, plus design tips, templates	SCU Library Guides
The Arty Teacher: How to Make a Zine	Step-by-step guide with photos, cutting/folding instructions, and classroom ideas	The Arty Teacher
“Teaching with Zines” (ZineLibraries.info)	A compiled zine (yes, a zine) with resources, best practices, and reflections on using zines in education	zinelibraries.info
Barnard Zine Library – Lesson Plans	Sample lesson plans, ideas across content areas, ways to scaffold, suggestions for grading/feedback	zines.barnard.edu
TUIMP: The Universe In My Pocket	“Using Zines in the Classroom and How to Make a Single-Page Booklet Zine” (OER)	arXiv

Prophets of a Future Not Our Own

A friend made this prayer into a short video and, while the focus is on the work of Christians (real Christians, not the power-mad Christian Nationalists currently trying to ruin literally everything in the world), I can’t help but see our work as educators reflected here, as well.

This prayer was first presented by Cardinal Dearden in 1979 and quoted by Pope Francis in 2015. This reflection is an excerpt from a homily written for Cardinal Dearden by then-Fr. Ken Untener on the occasion of the Mass for Deceased Priests, October 25, 1979. Pope Francis quoted Cardinal Dearden in his remarks to the Roman Curia on December 21, 2015. Fr. Untener was named bishop of Saginaw, Michigan, in 1980.

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent
enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of
saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.

No prayer fully expresses our faith.

No confession brings perfection.

No pastoral visit brings wholeness.

No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.

No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.

This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an
opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master
builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.