I. From “Show Me” to “Let Me Try”

Early math is very example-heavy. Both in classes, textbook explanations, and in worksheets. In the worst cases, you run into what is commonly called “Drill and Kill”, which means providing students with an enormous number of repetitions on a particular skill until their intellectual curiosity is crushed. That is, drill the topic until their spirit is killed.

That said, it does get a bad rap because when kids are starting to learn math, they do not have enough maturity to instantly get what is being shown to them, so they need to be shown *what* to do so that they can do it themselves.

Ideally, it’s a drill with decreasing support until the student masters the skill with no support given.

As kids get older and math gets complicated, the support and examples become less and less, until you get into higher-level undergraduate and graduate textbooks, where the student is supposed to come up with all of their own examples. Ultimately, the books at that level present the material in the form of axioms, definitions, theorems, and proofs. Two undergraduate math books famous for this are Landau’s Foundations of Analysis and Rudin’s Principles of Mathematical Analysis (a.k.a. Baby Rudin).

However, parents and kids are rarely told that this transition is coming or how to even deal with it.

One way to start very early in preparing for this transition is to have your kid start making their own example problems for the math material they are learning.

As they get older, their examples will improve, and by the time they reach the definition-theorem-proof format, they’ll be rock-solid at creating examples.

Not only that, but if your kid is very mathematically advanced, it gives them something to do when they are bored in math class, since they’ve already seen the material being presented ages ago.

II. The Cognitive Shift From Examples Provided to Examples Created

You can start with this cognitive shift regardless of where your kid is mathematically and what age they are currently celebrating. The earlier you start, the longer your kid will have to train their example-creation muscle, but you can start at any time.

The cognitive shift is from being a consumer of examples to a creator of examples.

Instead of thinking, “doing these exercises will teach me the technique”, it’s more of a “doing these exercises will show me how the technique works, so I can teach and test my understanding of how the technique works.”

It’s a bit of a small, subtle shift, but it does two things: a) creates a sense of ownership about learning the material, and b) enhances doing and reading the exercises. Once learned, your kid will constantly be on the lookout for how they could potentially create a similar problem.

Even at the earliest level, if a kid is doing a bunch of exercises to study multiplicative identity, for example:

• 1 x 1 =

• 2 x 1 =

• 3 x 1 =

• 4 x 1 =

They can start thinking about things like: What if we multiply by 1 to the 1s we’ve already multiplied?

• 1 x 1 x 1 =

• 2 x 1 x 1 =

• 3 x 1 x 1 =

• 4 x 1 x 1 =

Or maybe they think about whether they can substitute a fraction for the first number

• 1/2 x 1 =

• 2/2 x 1 =

• 3/2 x 1 =

• 4/2 x 1 =

Notice that this isn’t about making their math skills “faster” or solving more “difficult” problems; it’s about making sure they are exploring the technique even more deeply.

III. Why This Helps Kids Who Are “Bored”

Boredom often creeps into your math kid’s life in school math classes. They enjoy working on math, so it comes easier to them the more they do it. Suddenly, they are “ahead of the class” and bored with the material being presented.

One approach is to start petitioning the school for advanced work, grade-skipping, pull-in instruction, pull-out instruction, grade-telescoping, etc. However, it’s not clear whether this will alleviate boredom in the long term, let alone whether the teacher, school, or district will even consider it.

What we can do as adults who work with kids who love math is explain that the surface is easy, but the idea may not be. Boredom often means the *presentation* is easy—not the concept. That is, the work they are doing in their classroom is easy, but that doesn’t mean that the idea is simple.

For example, consider multiplication as repeated addition. A mathy kid will soon have most of the multiplication tables memorized, so they can sail through any work in this area easily and quickly. If they talk about being “bored” with this, ask them to come up with example questions where repeated addition may or may not work, or how it might work differently.

For instance, does multiplication as repeated addition work with negative numbers? Have them come up with some simple examples where either the first number or the second number is negative. Does it work? What does it even mean to do a repeated addition of a negative number?

Creating more complex versions of easy problems restores challenge and because the kids themselves are coming up with the questions, not you, the problems will be right at the edge of their mathematical maturity. Ask them to change numbers or constraints, or even context.

This can be done at home and, probably more helpfully, at school. At school, they can do it silently in their head or on the side of a piece of paper. They still do the school work, but they also build their problem-creation muscle at the same time.

What we really like about this method is that it doesn’t require the teacher’s permission or the creation of new material. Additionally, if they finish an assignment/test/work early, they can turn the waiting time into time for mathematical thinking.

IV. A Practical, Research-Aligned Ladder for Problem-Posing

Once you’re bought in and your kid, maybe with your help, starts creating their own problems, a question that comes up is - well, is it a well-posed problem? That is, is it really using and testing the technique correctly?

There is a huge mountain of research and practical experience that goes into problem creation for helping cement learning. I’m not going to go into that here.

I think it would be more helpful to give you the synthesized version.

There are 5 general levels that the problem-posing can go through:

Level 0 — Solve (baseline)

• Solve a standard example that’s an exact copy from the book/lecture

• This is to make sure the student understands the method

• Example: The lecture/book showed an example of 3 * 4 = 3 added four times = 12, so the student poses the problem 3 * 4.

Level 1 — Near-Transfer Problem Posing

• Change one element (numbers, context)

• Same structure, same method

• Strongly supported by research for young learners

• Example: The lecture/book showed an example of 3 * 4 = 3 added four times = 12, the student poses the problem 2 * 4.

Level 2 — Method-Preserving Problem Posing

• Change many elements, same underlying technique

• Structure preserved, surface changed

• Student explains *why* the same method applies

• Example: The lecture/book showed an example of 3 * 4 = 3 added four times = 12, the student poses the problem 7 * 5.

Level 3 — Constraint-Driven Problem Posing

• Given constraints, not a template

• Requires planning, verification, and reasoning

• Example: The lecture/book showed an example of 3 * 4 = 3 added four times = 12, the student poses the problem 3 * some number = a number that must be less than 10. As a bonus, they could say what the minimum and maximum numbers are that would work to be less than 10.

Level 4 — Error-Sensitive Problem Posing

• Design a problem that exposes a misconception that they or they think another student may trip up on

• Shows near-teaching-level understanding

• Example: The lecture/book showed an example of 3 * 4 = 3 added four times = 12, the student poses the problem 3 * 0 because what does it even mean to add 3 zero times? Do you end up with 3 or 0? That may trip some students up. Being able to spot potential sources of confusion indicates the edges where the mathematical technique might not work or require a different approach.

As with most aspects of parenting, it’s helpful to work with your kid through examples of different types of problems they might encounter. You and they don’t always need to reach Level 4 for each topic/technique, as higher levels are unlocked only when a deeper understanding of the mathematical technique develops. So when they first encounter a technique, ideally, you start at level 0 and try to replicate examples they saw in class or in the book. Then, as they work on homework, they may move up one or two levels as they see other worked examples and solve problems on their own. Eventually, maybe a few sections or even chapters, they (and you) might arrive at level 4 problem posing.

V. Problem Posing Builds Mathematical Maturity

As in the last paragraph, as the student becomes more comfortable with the material, their ability to delve deeper into questions that test the actual technique will improve. They’ll be able to identify the structure and formulate questions that probe it. They’ll come up with questions that test the boundaries of a technique, when it works, and when it doesn’t. They may reach the point where they can ask questions about when this technique breaks and what to expect when it does.

Mathematical Maturity means being able to do the above with skill and efficiency, unprompted. This is how mathematicians actually work, which is why, as students progress further along their mathematical journey, the books and courses they study have fewer and fewer worked examples. And as they explore the four levels of questions for each new mathematical object/technique/idea, it reinforces what they’ve learned about previous mathematical ideas. Which further entrenches and enhances their understanding of the subject.

Lastly, as they keep posing these problems, they will start to build intuition about how things might work, where they may break down, and how they can apply them in multiple places such that when they hit the abstraction of high school algebra or college mathematics or Ph.D. level mathematics, it’ll feel natural rather than a step up that may be too big to cross.

Down the line, kids will start seeing math as mathematicians see math: objects to explore, not rules to obey. Mathematicians treat concepts like numbers, shapes, sets, and many other things as real abstract objects that can be investigated, much like a biologist would investigate a new creature. Instead of applying memorized formulas, mathematicians “poke and prod” mathematical objects to see what happens, looking for patterns and relationships.

VI. The Parent–Child Dynamic Shift

One fun aspect of this question-posing technique is that it inverts the power dynamic between the adult and the child. Since the child is the one asking the questions, it’s now the adult who has to do the work and come up with the answer. Which the child then checks. In effect, the kid is now the teacher, and you are now the students.

As an adult, it can be helpful to make silly mistakes or make a big show of how hard the problems they made are. Obviously, don’t overdo it. Kids are very smart, and you don’t want them to think you’re making fun of them. But gentle teasing can be fun to work with and will give you some insight into what they understand.

Plus, after a day of being in school where they have the lower hand in the power dynamics with the teacher, it can be wonderful for the kid to feel like they have the upper hand. Especially when the rest of their day involves being corrected, evaluated, or rushed.

You can even ask them to assign you homework for the next day or week. It’s a fun way to make math time feel less “let’s do more worksheets” and more “let’s figure out how to trick my parent.”

VII. What Happens When Kids Create Examples They Can’t Solve

They got you. They asked a problem you couldn’t solve. And when you ask them to solve it, they can’t solve it either! Oops! And maybe a hooray as well!

This will happen all the time because there’s a lot of math that’s either not well taught at the elementary school or not well specified. This is a feature, not a bug. Many well-known problems in professional mathematics are easily stated but remain unsolved.

Going back to our multiplication as a repeated addition example. What if the kid asks you to multiply 2 and 1/2, that is, 2 * 1/2? If you subscribe to the first number being the thing you’re going to add repeatedly, what does it mean to do “1/2” of an addition? It leads to either trying to work around it by introducing new techniques (multiplication is commutative: a * b = b * a; 2 * 1/2 = 1/2 * 2, so it’s two repeated additions of 1/2), or trying to explain multiplication another way (multiplication is later taught as “scaling” up and down, rather than repeated addition”).

When it happens, it leads to great questions like:

• Why does this one work?

• Why doesn’t this one?

• What changed?

These questions help you discuss each of your understandings, and you may even revisit definitions to better understand the mathematical idea. These questions lead to recognizing patterns that stick because they were studied and prodded, not memorized.

VIII. The Bigger Picture: Play as Serious Work

For kids who love math, this form of building understanding almost feels like “play”. The goal isn’t to complete 100 problems before bed; it’s to poke and prod this “thing” to figure out how it actually works.

Playing around through exploration then opens up many fun questions and possibilities.

One exploration that I loved as a kid and helped me memorize the 9’s multiplication table row was *that the “tens” place goes from 0 to 9, and the “ones” place goes from 9 to 0.*

09
18
27
36
45
54
63
72
81
90

What is it about multiplying by 9s, that is, doing repeated additions of 9, that makes this pattern form?

Why is it that multiplying by 8s, that is, doing repeated additions of 8, doesn’t make this pattern form?

08
16
24
32
40
48
56
64
72
80

In the 8’s example, the “tens” places go: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, while the “ones” place goes “8, 6, 4, 2, 0, 8, 6, 4, 2, 0”.

I won’t ruin it for you by answering it here, but ask your kid to work with you to figure out why this happens. As a hint, think about how the “tens” place and the “ones” place are both used when counting up to 10.

IX. Closing: A Quiet Superpower

When your kid can invent their own examples, they will have a very useful tool for when they are stuck or bored. They will know how to test ideas, come up with examples that might help them solve the problem, and explore why something isn’t working on their own.

Later, they’ll be able to trust themselves when math (or other STEM subjects) textbooks stop holding their hands.

It’s a long process, and it’ll take years to get there, but if you start now, gently, playfully, and without pressure, they’ll get there. And over time, math stops feeling like something that happens *to* them and starts feeling like something they can explore. And as a bonus, your math will also get better!

X. Closing

That’s all for today :) For more Kids Who Love Math treats, check out our archives.

Stay Mathy!

Talk soon,
Sebastian

The PS1 was an unrivaled time for soundtracks that go incredibly hard. Games like Ridge Racer Type 4,  No One Can Stop Mr. Domino, Ape Escape (and basically anything that Soichi Terada ever did), Ace Combat 3 Electrosphere and Ghost in the Shell: Megatech Body all punch well above their weight. Hell, even the Animorphs game kinda goes. In that vein, if you have never listened to the soundtrack to Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf AKA Looney Tunes Sheep Raider, you should correct that right now because it contains at least one incredible heater.

Sheep, Dog ‘n' Wolf was a bizarre celshaded stealth action puzzler that came out in 2001 starring Ralph Wolf (NOT Wile E. Coyote) and described at the time by Infogrames’ Director of Marketing as “E-Rated Metal Gear.” The soundtrack was done by a musician named Eric Caspar, and though a lot of it feels like boilerplate production music, it does have bangers. 

One track in particular stands out, an ambient DnB track that could easily fit into any racing game from the era. It is unclear what this track is called or if it has a name, although I have seen a few sites like KHInsider and Discogs cite it as “Fronzy Last/Fronzylast_v3.” The track itself appears in the Planet X stage later in the game, which you can see by watching this speedrun attempt.

Anyway, enjoy this oddly specific track that keeps appearing in my YouTube suggested feed. Also check out this extremely of-the-era full page print ad complete with Typewriter font.

Researchers at Anthropic published their findings around how AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills:

We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery […] Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the threshold of statistical significance.

Wait, what? Let me read that again:

using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery

Ouch.

Honestly, the entire articles reads like those pieces you find on the internet with titles such as “Study Finds Exercise Is Good for Your Health” or “Being Kind to Others Makes People Happier”.

Here’s another headline for you: Study Finds Doing Hard Things Leads to Mastery.

Cognitive effort—and even getting painfully stuck—is likely important for fostering mastery.

We already know this. Do we really need a study for this?

So what are their recommendations? Here’s one:

Managers should think intentionally about how to deploy AI tools at scale

Lol, yeah that’s gonna happen. You know what’s gonna happen instead? What always happens when organizational pressures and incentives are aligned to deskill workers.

Oh wait, they already came to that conclusion in the article:

Given time constraints and organizational pressures, junior developers or other professionals may rely on AI to complete tasks as fast as possible at the cost of skill development

AI is like a creditor: they give you a bunch of money and don’t talk about the trade-offs, just the fact that you’ll be more “rich” after they get involved.

Or maybe a better analogy is Rumpelstilskin: the promise is gold, but beware the hidden cost might be your first-born child.

---

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Been thinking a lot about this Ted Chiang quote recently: “I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

How did we get here?

Neither major party seems to care about excellence in education — not really, not in a way that translates into serious policy. Democrats have abandoned it for equity theater. Republicans have abandoned it for embarrassingly easy culture war wins. And American students are caught in the middle, their education held hostage by a political system that has forgotten what schools are actually for.

This is a story about how we got to this impasse, and what it might take to get out.

Part I: The Democratic Retreat from Excellence

Democrats were once the party Americans trusted on education. That trust has eroded, and it’s worth understanding why.

The progressive education reform movement has become laser-focused on equity — specifically, on closing achievement gaps between demographic groups. On its face, this sounds reasonable. Who could object to helping struggling students catch up? But in practice, this focus has come at the expense of effective pedagogy and educational excellence. Worse, many of the reforms pursued in equity’s name actually reproduce the patterns of injustice they claim to address.

The Moral Logic of Progressive Education Reform

To understand how progressives think about education policy, you have to understand their moral framework. For progressives, excellence measures — absolute gains in student learning — don’t have what Freddie deBoer calls “social justice valence” unless they also address relative disparities. A reform that raises all boats equally leaves the achievement gap unchanged, and therefore fails to address the underlying injustice progressives care about.

This creates a strange asymmetry. Progressives cannot applaud excellence measures unless they also close gaps. But they can applaud apparent equity measures even if they don’t improve learning at all. The social justice framing is morally primary; gifted students are already doing well enough and are not objects of serious concern.

The result? Excellent students get abandoned. Gifted and talented programs are cut. Selective admissions are eliminated. And the focus shifts entirely to reducing disparities — even when the methods used to reduce those disparities don’t actually help anyone learn.

Biting the Hand That Feeds

There’s a bitter irony at work here. The most educated progressives — the ones driving these reform efforts — are themselves insulated from the harms of the bad pedagogy they support.

As the parties have become more polarized by education level, progressives are increasingly those who did well in school, often effortlessly, often because their parents were also highly educated and supported learning at home. It is easy for these reformers to take pedagogy for granted. If they or their children could already read well before entering school, they may not see the failure of whole language instruction for children who don’t learn what they need at home.

This is the central tragedy of progressive education reform: the people making the decisions are precisely the people least affected by them. They can afford tutors when public schools fail. They can move to better districts. They can pay for private schools. The costs of their experiments are borne by the families who have no such options.

Constructivism: The Theory That Sounds Good, But Isn’t

The pedagogical theories progressives are drawn to sound like equity wins that also help learning. They do neither.

Consider Jo Boaler’s approach to math instruction, which deemphasizes memorization of basic facts and promotes open-ended “discovery” learning. Or Lucy Calkins’ whole language approach to reading, which rejects systematic phonics instruction in favor of having students “discover” reading through exposure to literature. Both approaches are marketed as more engaging, more creative, more equitable than traditional methods.

The problem is that they’re not backed by the science of learning. Decades of rigorous research show that explicit instruction — clear, systematic teaching of foundational skills — produces better outcomes than constructivist approaches, especially for struggling students. The students who can “discover” mathematical concepts or “pick up” reading naturally are the ones who already have strong foundations built at home. The students who most need structured instruction are precisely the ones most harmed when it’s withheld.

And so the methods marketed as equitable actually widen achievement gaps. Wealthier students can afford better instruction outside of school; poorer students cannot. The progressive education establishment has spent decades promoting approaches that systematically disadvantage the students they claim to care most about.

When “Equity” Isn’t About Achievement

When progressives aren’t focused on equity in academic achievement, they’re often focused on other kinds of equity in the school setting — which frequently manifest as culture-war issues that are wildly out of touch with median voters.

Discipline. Progressive educators have pushed hard for “restorative justice” practices that minimize suspensions and expulsions. The theory is that traditional discipline disproportionately affects minority students, and that restorative approaches are both fairer and more effective at changing behavior. The reality is much messier. Many restorative justice implementations have led to chaotic classrooms, with teachers unable to remove disruptive students and struggling students unable to learn in the resulting environment. Parents — including minority parents — consistently support stronger discipline than progressive reformers advocate.

Curriculum. Progressive educators have pushed for curricular changes involving critical race theory, ethnic studies requirements, and “culturally responsive pedagogy.” Whatever the merits of these approaches in principle, in practice they often arrive as mandates that districts must implement before addressing basic reading and math deficiencies. When parents are worried about whether their kids can do arithmetic, telling them the curriculum now includes mandatory modules on systemic racism reads as tone-deaf, at best. It makes parents question whether the district has their children’s best educational interests at heart.

Admissions. When Harvard’s admissions office described Asian applicants as lacking personality, we saw how elite institutions can violate civil rights while claiming to promote equity. The pattern of discriminating against high-performing Asian students in the name of diversity has been replicated at selective high schools across the country — from Stuyvesant in New York to Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. These policies paper over old racial myths with new ones, all while claiming the mantle of social justice.

The Political Consequences

The political consequences of this approach have been severe. Democrats have hemorrhaged trust on education — an issue that was once a pillar of their electoral coalition. David Shor and other Democratic strategists have warned for years that the party’s education positions are electoral poison, but the warnings have largely gone unheeded.

The teachers’ unions — major players in Democratic fundraising and organizing — have been consistent advocates for many of the most unpopular progressive positions, from keeping schools closed during COVID to defending curricula that parents find alienating. Democratic politicians, afraid to punch left, have generally deferred to the unions rather than to the median voter.

The result is a doom loop. Progressive education policies alienate parents. Parents flee to charter schools, private schools, or the suburbs. Public school enrollment declines. The political coalition that supports public education weakens. And the institutions that remain double down on the very approaches that caused the flight in the first place.

Meanwhile, the Southern states that have embraced evidence-based literacy instruction are seeing real gains — gains that serve as a political embarrassment to blue states that should be outperforming them. This is how issues and institutions transform from reliable political architecture into ammunition for one’s opponents. Chris Rufo doesn’t have to be a good batter when Democrats keep serving up wiffle balls!

Part II: The Republican Absence of Vision

Republicans have had easy pickings. Rejecting bad progressive ideas has required no serious thought about what should replace them.

When conservatives reject the DEI focus in education, they can claim to be re-centering excellence as the guiding goal. When they reject progressive culture-war overreaches, they can claim classrooms are for learning, not politics. But this rhetorical positioning allows Republicans to appear pro-excellence without actually advancing the policies, pedagogical techniques, and curricular changes that matter.

Winning by Saying No

Consider the political arithmetic. (I’m sorry this is so clunky, I’m really not a math guy. Metaphors, though!) When Democrats introduce a bad idea, we go from zero to minus-x. When Republicans defeat that bad idea, we go from minus-x back to zero. Republicans can claim victory — they stopped something harmful! — without having accomplished anything positive in a cumulative, genuinely progressive way.

But American education wasn’t some excellence utopia before DEI. The same constructivist pedagogies that progressives now wrap in equity language have been undermining student learning for decades. The same ed-school orthodoxies that produce today’s “culturally responsive” curricula produced yesterday’s “whole language” instruction. Defeating the latest progressive fad is necessary but nowhere near sufficient.

Republicans don’t have to outrun the bear. They just have to outrun Democrats. And right now, Democrats are making that very easy.

The School Choice Escape Valve

The positive vision Republicans do offer is school choice — vouchers, charter schools, education savings accounts. The theory is that market competition will drive improvement: parents will choose better schools, forcing bad schools to improve or close.

There’s something to this. The ability to exit a failing school is valuable, and competition can spur innovation. The One Big Beautiful Bill’s new national voucher program represents a significant expansion of this approach.

But school choice alone doesn’t solve the underlying problems. Charter schools and private schools draw from the same pool of teachers trained in the same ed schools with the same bad pedagogical theories. Many charter schools use the same constructivist curricula as the public schools families are fleeing. The escape valve lets some families get out, but it doesn’t fix the pipeline.

And school choice, as currently implemented, risks abandoning the students stuck in dysfunctional public schools. Not every family can navigate voucher programs or find transportation to better schools. The market vision, in its enthusiasm for choice, can become indifferent to those who have no good choices available.

The Southern Surge as Exception

There is one genuinely positive development on the Republican side: the Southern literacy surge. States like Mississippi and Alabama have adopted evidence-based reading instruction — systematic phonics, explicit teaching, regular assessment — and seen dramatic improvements in student performance. We can thank Karen Vaites for comprehensive coverage of this genuinely positive development.

This is what a positive vision for education actually looks like: identify what works, implement it systematically, measure the results, and adjust. The Southern states did this not by fighting culture wars but by taking the science of reading and curricula implementation expertise seriously.

If more red states adopt this playbook, it could represent a genuine transformation. But so far, the Southern Surge remains an exception. Most Republican education policy remains defined by what it opposes rather than what it represents.

Part III: The Trump Distortion

Into this already dysfunctional landscape has come the Trump administration, whose approach to education policy has been ... aggressive.

Burning It Down

The administration’s approach to the Department of Education has been less reform than demolition. DOGE-initiated cuts gutted the personnel needed for basic functions — like producing the annual Condition of Education report that Congress has required since 2002. Whether these cuts were legally valid is now beside the point; you can’t wave a magic wand to reconstitute departed researchers and statisticians.

The administration has conflated two different goals: making government more efficient and eliminating progressive policies. These overlap in places but are not the same thing. Cutting the staff who compile education statistics does nothing to advance any conservative policy goal; it just makes it harder to know what’s happening in American schools.

DEI as the Only Issue

The administration’s fixation on DEI has crowded out attention to everything else. Fighting with universities over diversity statements, investigating admissions policies, threatening funding cuts — these actions dominate the education news cycle.

Meanwhile, the education establishment has responded by doubling down on DEI practices, sometimes openly defying new regulations and state laws. The result is a mutually reinforcing spiral where both sides treat DEI as the only education issue that matters.

The tragedy is that many Americans are sufficiently disgusted with elite education institutions that they’re content with “burn it all down” as a result. When Harvard and Stanford have spent years promoting policies that seem designed to alienate ordinary parents, schadenfreude at their difficulties is understandable. But “own the libs” is not an education policy. The question of what should replace the current system remains unanswered.

Part IV: What’s Being Left on the Table

Both parties are leaving enormous political opportunities on the table.

Polling consistently shows that Americans — including majorities of all minority Americans — support gifted education, acceleration for advanced students, and rigorous academic standards. They support discipline policies that keep classrooms orderly. They want their kids to learn to read and do math. These are not controversial positions among actual voters, even if they’re controversial among education policy elites.

The party that credibly commits to evidence-based instruction, high standards, and meeting students where they are — rather than where ideological frameworks say they should be — has a significant political opportunity. The party that actually delivers results, as Mississippi has for reading, will have a compelling case to make.

The Stakes Are Higher for Democrats

The stakes are asymmetric. Democrats control the institutions that drive education policy and research: the ed schools, the teachers’ unions, the professional associations. This gives them both more responsibility for the current mess and more capacity to fix it.

But it also means that the ideological capture of those institutions constrains what Democratic politicians can advocate. Ed schools remain captured by constructivist theories. Unions remain committed to policies that protect member interests over student interests. Critical education theories have become the default framework for thinking about schooling in progressive spaces.

For Democrats to credibly reset on education, they would need to confront these institutional interests. That’s politically difficult — but the alternative is continued erosion of public trust in public education.

The CEP Vision

This is where we come in. The Center for Educational Progress has been developing a positive vision for educational excellence that either party could adopt:

Meet students where they are. This means ability grouping, acceleration for advanced learners, and remediation for those who need it. It means abandoning the “one-size-fits-all” model that holds back fast learners and fails to support struggling ones.

Embrace the science of learning. This means explicit instruction in foundational skills, systematic phonics for reading, practiced fluency for math. It means deferring discovery-based approaches until students have mastered the basics.

Measure what matters. This means regular assessment to inform instruction, honest reporting of results, and accountability for outcomes. It means resisting the temptation to lower standards in the name of closing gaps.

Let every student advance as far and fast as their curiosity and determination will take them. This is the vision we’ve been developing — and it’s a vision either party could champion.

Part V: A Path Forward

Educational excellence should be a bipartisan issue. But right now, both parties have left the field. This creates an opportunity for whichever party is willing to seize it.

For Republicans: “We actually have a positive vision that promotes what we care about — the learning and development of our children. And the pedagogy we support is backed by the research. Democrats claim to be the party of ‘trust the science,’ but in education, that’s clearly false. We are the party you can trust to follow the evidence.”

For Democrats: “We are returning to the positive vision of education that you used to trust us for. Republicans don’t have a positive vision — just criticisms of progressive excesses. We see now that we ignored the science of learning, and that even if our motives were moral, the effects were worse. We still care about disadvantaged children, but now we know the right way to help them learn. We’re righting the ship for all children.”

Either script could work. Everyone seems to be focused on… everything else, though. (And I’m also not a political consultant. Just a lawyer — but not a barred one (yet)!)

American students don’t care about any political posturing. They just want schools that teach them to read, to calculate, to think. They want the chance to advance as far as their talents will take them. Whether they know it or not.

Neither party is currently offering that. But one of them could. Or both! The iron is hot, and the opportunity is there for the taking. Who will strike first?

Thomas Briggs is the (Interim) Executive Director and Director of Operations at the Center for Educational Progress.

We gotta talk about AI as a programming tool for the arts

Chris Ashworth is the creator and CEO of QLab, a macOS software package for “cue-based, multimedia playback” which is designed automate lighting and audio for live theater productions.

I recently started following him on TikTok where he posts about his business and theater automation in general - QLab own the Voxel theater in Baltimore which they use as a combined performance venue and research lab, and the resulting videos offer a fascinating glimpse into a world I know virtually nothing about.

This latest TikTok describes his Claude Opus moment, after he used Claude Code to build a custom lighting design application for a very niche project and put together a useful application in just a few days that he would never have been able to spare the time for otherwise.

Chris works full time in the arts and comes at generative AI from a position of rational distrust. It's interesting to see him working through that tension to acknowledge that there are valuable applications here to build tools for the community he serves.

I have been at least gently skeptical about all this stuff for the last two years. Every time I checked in on it, I thought it was garbage, wasn't interested in it, wasn't useful. [...] But as a programmer, if you hear something like, this is changing programming, it's important to go check it out once in a while. So I went and checked it out a few weeks ago. And it's different. It's astonishing. [...]

One thing I learned in this exercise is that it can't make you a fundamentally better programmer than you already are. It can take a person who is a bad programmer and make them faster at making bad programs. And I think it can take a person who is a good programmer and, from what I've tested so far, make them faster at making good programs. [...] You see programmers out there saying, "I'm shipping code I haven't looked at and don't understand." I'm terrified by that. I think that's awful. But if you're capable of understanding the code that it's writing, and directing, designing, editing, deleting, being quality control on it, it's kind of astonishing. [...]

The positive thing I see here, and I think is worth coming to terms with, is this is an application that I would never have had time to write as a professional programmer. Because the audience is three people. [...] There's no way it was worth it to me to spend my energy of 20 years designing and implementing software for artists to build an app for three people that is this level of polish. And it took me a few days. [...]

I know there are a lot of people who really hate this technology, and in some ways I'm among them. But I think we've got to come to terms with this is a career-changing moment. And I really hate that I'm saying that because I didn't believe it for the last two years. [...] It's like having a room full of power tools. I wouldn't want to send an untrained person into a room full of power tools because they might chop off their fingers. But if someone who knows how to use tools has the option to have both hand tools and a power saw and a power drill and a lathe, there's a lot of work they can do with those tools at a lot faster speed.

Tags: theatre, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, tiktok, ai-ethics, coding-agents, claude-code