Super short post today, directed to parents and guardians. Teachers should feel 100% free to pass this URL on.

Social media, texting and playing games can effortlessly eat up a whole night. When that all-night phone trend first popped up, I sometimes wondered if my middle-school students were on drugs. Repeat offenders had ALL the signs except for the smell of smoke: frequent tardiness, red eyes, vacant expressions, difficulty communicating, and an unfortunate tendency to nod off. Sometimes a kid smells like smoke, too, and then it’s anybody’s guess what mix of factors led to the latest nap.

Eduhonesty: They will plead and even beg. They will complain vociferously. They may get so snotty and dramatic you want to hide in a hotel room in a foreign country. Nevertheless, please, pull the night phones. In the parenting game, unplugging those nocturnal distractions is truly one of those hills worth dying on.

I understand that this fight can be exhausting, not to mention tough to monitor. Those little supercomputers are small. However, sleep is essential for learning.

Sleep helps with memory consolidation, brain repair, and the retention of new information. Cognitive function depends on sleep. Lack of sleep compromises focus, concentration, logical reasoning, and complex problem-solving, and especially affects the functions of the prefrontal cortex, which manages complex thinking along with emotions and behavior.

The prefrontal cortex doesn’t even mature until the mid-twenties. Parents and teachers can’t do much about that. We can try to help children learn organization and impulse control, we can teach strategies to help them plan, make decisions, solve problems and focus. While doing this, we will hopefully work a fair amount of math, English, and other academic learning into the picture.

In the meantime, though, as we struggle and too often bog down in the myriad issues interfering with learning in US education today, I’d like to again emphasize today’s message: This is a hill we have to hold.

We can’t control the proliferation of electronics, but we can turn off the lights in boring, dark bedrooms devoid of phones.

Today’s post is only peripherally about education. We all have friends now who are virtually (pun intended) living on their phones. Tap tap. Tap tap. Tap tap. Adults, children and students message-game-video-photo-latte-social-media-step their way through the day, taking breaks to check weather and even answer actual phone calls.

Addiction: From the Cambridge Dictionary: an inability to stop doing or using something, especially something harmful.

We associate addiction with old-time drugs, alcohol and gambling, but I will throw phones into the list without a second thought.

That word “influencer” deserves special attention. Humans dream big dreams. We do kids no favor by glossing over visions of would-be global prominence, dreams of millions of followers. While there’s no need to dump gallons of reality over aspiring fashionistas and trendsetters in our classrooms, these hopefuls will often benefit from a detox. Like the high school student who is mostly ignoring academics except for the bare minimum required to play in Friday’s football game, our fashionista needs a reality check, needs to answer a version of that basic “What if the NFL does not work out?” question:

What is your fallback plan?

POSSIBLE 2026 GOAL OR ASPIRATION

Parents: How about a regular, scheduled electronics shutdown? Kids can easily become obsessive about social media numbers, comparing follower totals to those of peers’ and unknowns online. Others simply prefer to play games, text friends, or randomly surf instead of listening to the day’s new math concept. Those reasons are only a few of today’s jagged, electronic icebergs crowding today’s adolescent shipping lanes.

I suggest starting with one day a week — one day of reading, puzzles, watercolors, mosaics, baking, card games, board games, model building, ice skating, hiking or any other creative pursuit that has nothing to do with a phone. And, yes, this is a family concept. We all put our phones down.

If this idea seems impossible or too impractical, I will observe that the very impossibility of putting those phones down supports the need to sometimes shut down the phone pipeline. According to AI, “Addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disorder characterized by compulsive substance seeking or behavior, continued use despite harmful consequences, and long-lasting changes in brain function … It manifests as a need for a substance or activity (like gambling, sex, or tech) that interferes with life, causing physical, mental, or social harm.”

Note that word “tech.” Today’s phones are so ubiquitous that they become part of a 24/7 lifestyle, stealing sleep, study time, and focus on nonelectronic, alternative activities. When does a phone become part of a “compulsive behavior that interferes with life and causes harm?” There’s no easy answer to that question.

Eduhonesty: I hope some of my readers whose kids are tap, tap, tapping will try this. One day a week. Or three hours a day. Whatever works for your lifestyle that regularly turns off the phones for a while. Our kids need help. They need the down time they don’t know they don’t have.

For those not following me on Facebook, I thought I’d share this post. I mostly do food and puppy but I’m on a mission this morning:

Eduhonesty: Here’s the bit of science that education has been missing in the last few decades: You can damage or destroy a thing by measuring it. The fact that tests suck up instructional time is obvious. Less obvious is what all those tests are doing to miilions of kids. If you damage all the kids at once, it’s easy to attribute poor academic performance, along with rising depression and anxiety rates, to outside factors such as previous COVID lockdowns, poor nutrition, screen time, and changing family dynamics. We can find so many excuses for the steep dip in childhood mental health that the dip even begins to seem natural.

Have we learned so little in the last few decades? In the recent past, we were even arguing about fluoride in the water. Then we repealed the old nutritional guidelines for schools, as if whole milk might help us. (It might, but that’s another post.) Part of today’s confusion no doubt stems from the multicausal nature of the US academic slide. COVID lockdowns did do real damage, damage spread unevenly across the landscape. Districts that had 1:1 computing set up before 2020 made the transition to remote learning much more easily than less-fortunate, cash-strapped districts scrambling to buy backordered laptops. School funding, school staffing levels, available childcare and mental health care almost always favor the financially fortunate.

Eduhonesty: So many small details, so easy to get lost… It’s no wonder we get stuck falling down into rabbit holes. Them we stare up toward the small pocket of light above us wondering what went wrong. Testing is on our list of possibly problematic activities, but it gets lost in the noise of federal policy shifts, overall academic learning loss, falling literacy, rising innumeracy, critical staffing shortages, funding inequities, etc.

In my view, annual levels of state standardized testing represent nothing short of unethical human experimentation. Standardized testing wallops kids year after year now, while the emphasis put on scores makes poor and even average performers repeatedly feel like losers and failures. We are losing instructional weeks and even months to testing when test prep is thrown into the larger testing picture. Kids can easily see how much adults now appear to care about these test results. They can also easily see when they have placed in the middle or lower groups within their grade.

How is this not unethical human experimentation? No one is asking those kids’ permission. For the most part, no one is asking their parents permission, either. In some states, parents are supposedly not “allowed” to let their children opt out of testing. Barriers have been put up to stop parents from removing students from standardized testing pools all over the country.

Yes, I took those tests as a kid in the sixties and seventies, but only for a few days in the spring. I wasn’t also taking multiple benchmark and practice standardized tests, and adults around me were not making a huge to-do out of that spring test. In “Stranger Things” terms, that test used to be a demigorgon flower, not a mindflayer.

Those numbers add up to one in five adolescents with diagnosed mental health issues. How many adolescents remain undiagnosed? How many are just toughing out their days until someone sees the cuts under their sleeves? How many are not receiving any mental health care because their cuts are still invisible, their facades still intact?

As control of state education returns to the states, I hope at least some U.S. states will attempt to answer my questions. Educational leaders have become enamored of numbers, often too many numbers that are being spewed out at too fast a rate to process. Those leaders need to remember the numbers in question are not just rolling mindlessly off some A.I. tongue. They are being provided by children, including the more than five million children referred to in the government’s own health brief.

My “next” book came out about seven months ago — about the time my husband suffered the first of three hospitalizations related to sepsis and pressure sores. Almost no marketing has been done for this book. I am sorry about that, especially since this is a well-detailed, carefully crafted book. I meld my classroom experiences with the theory that undermined and even sabotaged those experiences.

Fortunately, the book remains relevant. History sometimes gains relevance with time, as results support and even confirm expectations.

The Common Core Wasteland: How No Child Left Behind, Rigid Standards, and Overtesting Left Our Children Behind emphasizes the history of the last two decades in US education. In historical terms, the ink on the page of these events is barely dry,

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Common Core State Standards Initiative swept away whole child education in favor of focusing on standardized curricula and new test-score targets. The far-reaching implications of teaching to inflexible, predetermined goals were downplayed or even ignored. As curricula, instruction and assessments became one-size-fits-all, individualized instruction suffered — a natural consequence when almost all students were expected to take identical tests regardless of their circumstances or background knowledge.

Lost students became more lost, sometimes catastrophically so. In academically struggling areas, differentiated, student-centered learning vanished, replaced by frantic, furious pushes to improve test score results. At worst, all students in a grade might end up using a virtually identical curriculum, one based on expected state test questions, regardless of whether those students were in general education, special education, gifted and talented, or bilingual programs. Supports for outlying students fell away, sacrificed to pedagogical approaches intended to boost spring state test scores. The opportunity gap and its many facets — the wealth gap, resource gap, literacy gap, vocabulary gap, food scarcity gap and technology gap ended up being all but ignored by government leaders, and then by school district administrators and even teachers — who realized their continued employment might depend upon cooperating with the latest government mandates.

In 2020, the US technology gap hit schools particularly hard: Financially challenged districts scrambled to buy technology for online learning that wealthier districts already had put into place years previously. This book explains why pandemic learning loss and a resulting widening of the achievement gap had become inevitable, given the hidden costs of NCLB and the Common Core.

The Common Core Wasteland and its companion book, Fighting the White Knight, use classroom examples to show what happens when all-encompassing national government mandates hijack local education.

I believe “Fighting the White Knight” helps explain the recent widening of the achievement gap. We created calamitous educational policies, and yet somehow this post-pandemic growing gap in test scores nonetheless surprised us. COVID has been given the blame, but those assertions of blame are naive or even disingenuous.

Please believe me: The sad state of the gap cannot be laid at COVID’s door, even if COVID aggravated an already precarious situation. Simply, in poor US school districts, local funding had not provided enough. Not enough funding. Not enough academic choice. Not enough up-to-date resources. Not enough tutoring. In particular, not enough laptops, iPads and other technology. We had ignored the wisdom of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Across time and across the country, educational “reformers” had been trying to find solutions to the achievement gap that did not involve changing the US school funding system, hoping to find a magic fix for differences between zip codes, while deflecting attention away from the effects of local property-tax-based school funding. When the pandemic arrived, where were the computers and software required for remote learning? We know that answer now. We watched as districts scrambled to lay their hands on back-ordered Chromebooks and other tech, devices many of their students did not yet know how to use.

As I have observed before, property-tax-based funding favors Congresspeople, mid-level bureaucrats, and other decision makers. Middle-class (or better) employment allows parents to choose between more expensive, prosperous neighborhoods where education funding flows freely into schools that have all the support staff, technological devices and special services most parents could desire. Meanwhile, in less fortunate neighborhoods, laptops, iPads, desktops, software, books, aides, and tutoring tend to be much thinner on the ground. In the US educational system today, you still get what you can pay for. That can be a single language option on the curriculum instead of six different languages, and almost nothing for afterschool activities except sports, while luckier kids down the road get to pick between more than twenty after-school clubs, on top of the usual sports.

Eduhonesty: Frankin D. Roosevelt predicted COVID’s loss of learning in our poorer zip codes, even as so-called “reformers” pushed relentlessly for higher English and math test scores in schools without laptops or stable internet connections. Year after year, we ignored the tech gap. Meanwhile, those kids without technology and tech chops were receiving second-class educations at best.

Yes, our K-12 crowd spends too much time on screens. Screens seem to be ubiquitous and that fact creates its own challenges. But pencils, pens and paper have honestly become almost quaint, even as the ability to write or even read cursive becomes a steadily more exotic skill. If money is preventing groups of children from learning the technology of our time then I can only insist that funding reform is overdue.

Available, functional laptops cannot be allowed to be a luxury good.

• * O.K., I admit that “covert attempt superteacher” bit is definitely too long to tag onto my already lengthy subtitle!

This is a perfect example of good intentions run amok. None of these are bad ideas.

But the time demands are absurd, while much of this is simply teaching. Of course you link the content to your students lives. Of course you emphasize key vocabulary. Teaching does not need a lengthy formal plan for every hour and a whiteboard filled with sprawling objectives that sometimes intimidate students. Students who struggle to keep up with grade-level objectives may look at that whiteboard and tune out instead of tuning in. When the masterplans become too detailed, some of the kids in the mix don’t fit the plan. That’s where learning first starts to go wrong. But lost learning piles up, eventually becoming an insurmountable mountain or murky, unknown facts for less lucky students.

Eduhonesty: The more detailed the plan, the less flexible it becomes in spite of attempts at differentiation. In the end, a 50 minute period is only 50 minutes — and any items in the plan that don’t fit in those minutes then become part of the rising mound of things that never were taught.

The crucial question that begs an answer: If there are never leftover minutes — when will remediation ever happen?

HOWEVER — data only tells you what you did not know when you understand how to dig into that data. Data mining involves shoveling large quantities of numbers and people get lost in those numbers. Sometimes they choose to go astray, trying to bend the numbers to support what they intend to do anyway.

Of more importance, when you already know something, adding more data merely wastes time and money.

Eduhonesty: I could measure my height every day for a month. I wouldn’t grow any taller nor would I shrink. I know this before I pull out the tape measure.

A state test in the spring makes sense. But I believe a state test on top of two benchmark tests, both administered multiple times throughout the year, should be considered educational malpractice, except in the rarest of cases. Because every test sacrifices instructional hours that can never be recovered.

I’ve written this too many times. One more time into the breach, though, because many educational decision makers remain overly enamored of adding and analyzing data. Rather than learning the minutiae of learning gaps, we should be filling the gaps. We can’t fill those gaps while testing.

And we have to watch out for enthusiastic exhortations about the advantages of data.

One problem with discussions on the US educational system is the inherent breadth of the issues. It’s easy to mire down in multiple topics and lose focus. Sunday morning, I joined readers to discuss my book, “Fighting the White Knight: Saving Education from Misguided Testing, Inappropriate Standards and other Good Intentions.” We had a diverse group: people with no experience in education, a paraprofessional from a wealthy district, an urban charter teacher’s spouse, a retired teacher from another wealthy district, a university professor, and me.

I’d like to share one point from this morning that deserves much more attention than it has received.

Eduhonesty: As educators know, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) explicitly planned to evaluate US schools through expanded testing, designed to gain additional data on student progress. The Common Core set out to create a common national curriculum, and associated national test. That test was intended to homogenize data across the country.

Illinois provides a frightening example of what actually happened when various government entities used power and money to push NCLB and the Core on US students.

In Illinois, we abruptly threw all bilingual and special education students into the state testing pool, mostly dropping tests those subgroups had taken previously, but sometimes adding extra tests and thus subtracting instructional time. Over time, we changed the Illinois State Achievement Test (ISAT) into the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) to match new Core expectations. Then we changed PARCC into the Illinois Assessment of Readiness (IAR), because our PARCC scores pleased almost no one, except maybe a few vindictive psychopaths. Fierce arguments about changes to the IAR are currently underway. Some factions want to break the test into three parts. If this is done, the new IAR definitely will not be the IAR of the recent past.

Here’s the topic that never gets discussed, probably because there is nothing to be done: If we had left that first test, the ISAT, in place instead of playing test roulette, we would know a great deal more about student progress than we do now. When test administration and test content change significantly, the ability to make comparisons over time becomes lost. How does student achievement in 2024 compare to achievement in 2004, 2010 or 2020? Honestly, we don’t know. Answers to that question can be inferred, but the students of today are not taking anything close to the same test given to students in 2004. If 2024 students took the same algebra test as students from 2004, stakeholders could quickly say, “score are down 12%” and reliable, valid data would support that number. But despite burying ourselves in numbers, that reliable, valid data does not exist.

And the money that funded those national curricula, tests, and related professional developments and committee meetings, not to mention the money spent on purchases of test-related classroom materials? That money could probably have funded a permanent base on the moon. I honestly believe we might have spent enough $$$$$ to build a lunar colony — and sadly, if we had spent the money on the moon, and had left education alone, I believe today’s students would have come out academically, socially and emotionally ahead.

Recent reforms have provided yet another example of that old quote from the Viet Nam war: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Except the village remains ravished and wrecked in pockets throughout the country, and it’s unclear who — if anyone — we saved.

P.S. Yes, we do have comparable data from a national test. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a standardized test measuring academic performance given by the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. This test is only for students in grades 4, 8 and 12, however, and students do not receive test results.

How often do we need to repeat the material?

Until they get it.

And we need to be 100% clear — If we move on before students understand, there’s a real chance no one will fill in missing knowledge later. As curricula keep getting more demanding due to districts’ struggles to hit test targets, repeating material becomes more problematic. After curriculum planners put 192 days worth of material into the plans for a 180 day school year, often they can’t add in another whack at finding the area of a hexagon. With curricula stumbling clumsily over one another, maybe the hexagons will disappear. Maybe telling time will be left to a future person whose school’s curriculum has dropped the clocks that used to be taught in the next grade.

Eduhonesty: The risk of putting too much material into the curriculum and then going too fast is huge. Because if we “taught the material” but they “did not get it” — we taught NOTHING, all the while wasting our students time.

Why districts should hire extra help for small group interventions:

Without extra bodies in the picture,

The math’s wrong.

A fixed number of

teachers cannot do small

group interventions

without leaving other

kids rudderless,

teacherless, killing time

by default.