Ides of March Edition

Et tu, DOGE?

Current Mood (Photo by Tumisu via Pixabay)

I’m writing much of this month’s newsletter a few days in advance, due to a huge pile of hard deadlines, upcoming travel, and extra work stuff that is really eating into my schedule this month. By the time you read it, the Congress will have passed a budget for the current fiscal year … or not. It feels like we’re headed to a brief shutdown given how things are playing out, but you never know. My current hunch is that the House will barely pass the bill but the Senate will balk at the poison pills that Speaker Johnson added over the weekend. If that happens, your guess is as good as mine about where we head next.

[Late Thursday night update: House barely passed it, Senate looks iffy. No one saw the Schumer surprise coming!]

A request: For an upcoming project, we’re looking to talk to someone who works in a high school that has moved to a later start time each morning. Doesn’t need to have been a recent transition - we’re just looking for some off-the-record insights about how their school debated and implemented the change. Please let me know if you or someone you know has this experience, we’d love to chat with them!

As I was running errands during lunchtime today, I saw several daffodils in full bloom. We have yet to experience an extended stretch of warm weather here in West Tennessee, but it feels like it’s just around the corner. Best wishes for an early spring wherever you are located!

---

As always, I appreciate you sharing this newsletter with friends, along with a recommendation to subscribe. We hit over 1,000 reads last month! Thank you so much for accompanying me on this journey.

Please forward this newsletter and recommend it to friends. Let’s see if we can get to 2,000 views by the end of the summer!

---

Something Short

I was going to share a short blog post that I wrote in support of Kentucky’s advanced education legislation, but the piece got pulled when the bill flew through the Kentucky Senate much faster than anyone anticipated. It looks likely to get a floor vote imminently, then it goes to Governor Beshear’s desk for his signature. Given that it passed unanimously in the House and may do the same in the Senate, his approval shouldn’t be in doubt. One more state implementing automatic enrollment policies! This is a big deal for Kentucky students!

I did a short interview for KY public radio on the relevant issues addressed by the bill. It aired yesterday and is available here: https://t.co/GdtNnzv361

Something a Bit More Involved

One of my first major projects coming out of graduate school was a series of reviews and studies on creativity assessment. In 1998, I published a review of the subfield of creativity assessment with the eminent creativity researcher Mark Runco, then at Cal State Fullerton and now at Southern Oregon. The piece was titled, XXX, and it was surprisingly well-received.

The editors of Creativity Research Journal invited me to submit a paper to a special issue a couple summers ago, and I thought it would be fun to do a “25 years later” update on that original paper. And it was fun! There is so much good work being done right now, even beyond the application of AI that is all the rage in just about every field. There hasn’t been this much vitality and excitement in creativity assessments in decades, if ever. This one is titled, The Patient is Thriving! Current Issues, Recent Advances, and Future Directions in Creativity Assessment. Let me know if you’d like a copy.

Some Recent Things that Intrigued Me

I collected bunch of great links about the current political goings-on, but so much is happening so fast that even those I found last week are already out-of-date. Here are a few items that still feel fresh:

The DOGE Purge Ain’t Wrong, But It Sure Ain’t Right. One of my frustrations of the current political situation is that conservatives are (publicly, at least) blindly parroting the MAGA/DOGE line about all the crazy stuff that’s going on, when they should know better. But that’s hard to put into words, so I generally avoid the topic when it comes up. But this twitter thread really sums things up nicely. I especially like the point that the MAGA/DOGE worldview assumes economic competition is the source of the country’s problems, when it’s actually a problem of declining competitiveness. Lots of good points in this short post, definitely worth a quick read.

Maybe They Have a Plan? In a similar vein, I’ve been transparent about wanting to see major, long overdue reforms at the U.S. Department of Education. But firing over half the staff is not a reform strategy. I get why they went after some of the offices, but why fire nearly the entire IES staff? The formation of IES is arguably Bush II’s most impactful, longest lasting policy initiative. Because of the IES director’s term doesn’t run concurrently with presidential terms, IES has been directed by Republican appointees for a good deal of its history. Although I have my problems with IES, it’s impossible to argue that it hasn’t significantly improved the quality of education research in the country. And from a constitutionally conservative perspective, it makes good sense for the federal government to incentivize education research (i.e., it’s one education task that states historically do not invest in). One school of thought is that the White House has a plan to reinvigorate the feds’ education role, but that assumes the White House has a plan for anything. Another school of thought is that the twentysomethings running the DOGE operation in Education are nitwits, which is plausible.

Let me float another, admittedly far-fetched possibility: The Administration knows they don’t have nearly enough votes to kill the Department, and under reconciliation rules Congress can’t move programs from one agency to another (e.g., moving IES to NSF, which has been rumored). They can move a program out of an agency using reconciliation, and they can move a program into an agency using that simple majority mechanism (making it filibuster proof in the Senate). But they can’t move something out of one agency into another. Don’t send me hate mail, I didn’t make the reconciliation rules! So maybe this is a way to get that done? You destroy the valued function in one agency, then using reconciliation you “create” a very similar operation in another agency. This would imply a considerable amount of foresight, cunning, and knowledge of congressional procedure, which are not adjectives often assigned to the current administration. But it’s a more rationale theory than “they don’t know what they’re doing,” and I’m grasping for rationality right now.

[Right before I hit “send” on this month’s issue, it was announced that the feds are canceling all licenses for restricted-use data. This is looking more and more like a war on researchers and less like the three-dimensional chess strategy I hypothesize above.]

COVID Learning Loss. There are lots of theories about why learning loss happened during COVID. Sure, kids were out of school too long and our virtual replacements were lacking in several respects. But how do we explain why higher-performing students lost only a little (on average), but lower-performing students lost a lot and keep losing ground. This paper by my colleague Scott Peters and colleagues provides some insights.

Why Learning Keeps Declining. I’ve been thinking for a few weeks now that one of the explanation for continually declining NAEP scores isn’t the pandemic (the decline started years before), it was a combination of social media/smartphones and a major change to federal education law that sharply decreased accountability. The story below from the ADVANCE substack newsletter (which I highly recommend) gets into this a little bit. The conventional wisdom is that Congress won’t push accountability again anytime soon after the pushback regarding No Child Left Behind, but if (a) we can establish a stronger link between the removal of accountability measures and evidence of declining learning and (b) the decline continues … maybe Congress will have a stronger appetite for tackling this again.

The return of accountability

Were Lockdowns Good or Bad? This BBC article provides a nice overview of the health outcomes in country’s that never had official lockdowns during COVID. There’s not really a clear takeaway, though: They may have had some better outcomes, but they also may have had some worse outcomes. On the fifth anniversary of the first lockdowns, I’m seeing lots of retrospectives on the initial COVID response, and some of the takes are almost hysterically revisionist. We overreacted! We didn’t need to lockdown! Kids should have stayed in school! Really? Dozens of my friends and colleagues lost family members in the pre-vaccine phase of the pandemic, and I remember the photos of the mobile morgues full of body bags. It was horrible, we were unprepared (despite signs of it appearing as early as the previous November), and people were doing the best they could to protect us. They made mistakes, but they also probably saved many, many people.

Now let’s get ready for the next one, because it’s worth noting that COVID was arguably the fourth pandemic virus of the century - the next one likely isn’t that far away.

Some Things I Found to be Cool

Severance Season 2. The writers’ strike delayed the new season for three years, and although I loved the first season, I’d forgotten how good this show is. I’ve been watching episodes in fits and starts as I travel, and the season is so good that I may re-watch it from the start this summer. It builds off the first season in clever ways, and it’s never boring. That said, I’ve started to wonder if this is another “Lost” situation, in which the writers created a weird little world but had no idea where they were going with it (see also the Series of Unfortunate Events books). I have to believe the “Severance” team has a plan … I’ll be furious if they don’t. But for now, what a great show.

Harrison Ford’s Third Act. I thought Han Solo was the coolest movie character of all time back when I was a kid (and yes, he did shoot first in the cantina!). Then, of course, Indiana Jones became the coolest character ever. But Ford’s mid-career work was uninspired, with everything coming across as a paycheck job and very little effort on his part. However, his comedy work in Shrinking has been first-rate for two seasons now, and his performance during the second season of 1923 is also just fantastic. You can tell he’s having fun again. I’m all in on the Fordaissance (Ford + Renaissance, get it? I may copyright that).

Patriot on Amazon Prime. This was one of the first shows that Amazon created for its new Prime Video service. After the second season, Amazon retooled it’s entire video operation, and this show got canceled. This is one of the great tragedies in modern American entertainment. Here’s the catch, though: You have to make it through the first three episodes of Season 1, which are slightly confusing and almost boring. But starting in episode four … Holy smokes, does this become an amazing show! it’s a spy show (kinda), it’s a show about trust, deceit, and sacrifice (kinda), and it’s about the families we’re born into and the families we make (kinda). It’s also very, very funny, if quite dark. It is the piece of entertainment that I recommend more than any other, and it’s hard to believe you’re only seeing this five issues into this newsletter.

Every single person to whom I’ve recommended it contacts me after episode three and says a version of, “Why did you recommend this?” I encourage them to press on - and I know if they do, because a few days later they let me know that they binged the rest of Season 1 and all of Season 2 and are now furious that it was canceled. If you have Amazon Prime, give it a try! (Fair warning: Not suitable for most kids, primarily for two scenes that are hysterical but very R-rated).

The Terry Gross-Bill Burr interview. At about the five minute mark, it moves from awkward to contentious in a nanosecond. It stays really uncomfortable for a few minutes, but somehow they end up as friends by the end, with both laughing about it. A fascinating conversation!

Jade Plant of the Month

In last month’s poll, readers voted overwhelmingly for more jade plant content, with a healthy minority requesting some jade video. The past four weeks have been too overwhelming to produce a worthy video, so you’ll have to wait until April for that.

For now, feast your eyes on this beauty. It’s a healthy, young sunset jade. In contrast to last month’s variegated jade, with its dark green offset by an almost snowy white, the sunset jade is marked by warmer, softer colors - hence the name. The leaves get more mottled when getting lots of direct sun, which doesn’t happen through the winter, although it has enjoyed being outside 24/7 over the past few days. Even though it’s been housebound, it has still held onto the red edges from last summer, so we know it’s a happy little plant. It really enjoyed the rain last night, too. Jades are funny in that they are succulents - they don’t need much water at all - but they also LOVE water and will grow fast under rainy conditions. Will be interesting to see how fast this one grows after being outside in the rain and direct sun all next summer!

Jades are funny in that they are succulents - they don’t need much water at all - but they also LOVE water and will grow fast under rainy conditions. Will be interesting to see how fast this one grows after being outside in the rain and direct sun all summer!

Some Things to Consider

I normally discuss or preview events here, but I’m taking things in a different, more personal direction this month.

A couple weeks ago, we lost my cousin Mikey. He was only 33. He’s been in and out of the hospital for many years, especially as of late, and his body gave up on him late last month. His passing wasn’t surprising, but it was still incredibly sad.

What to say about Mikey? Despite his many struggles, he was funny, inquisitive, thoughtful, and kind. He gradually lost his hearing over time and occasionally struggled to communicate. Yet he always asked about each member of our family when I saw him, and he made sure you knew he was grateful to be with you.

He was, quite simply, the purest soul any of us will ever meet. I will miss him greatly. Please include Mike’s family in your thoughts and prayers. They were a great source of support and comfort to him, and it’s hard to imagine the loss they are experiencing

I’m sharing this because, as much as I tried to visit him, I didn’t visit him nearly enough. The day before the text arrived about his condition, I was thinking that I really needed to get up to see him again soon. One of my priorities this year is to see more of my friends and family. We’re scattered all over the country (the world, too, for that matter), and we’re all so busy. But I’ve lost a couple close friends and now Mikey over the past 18 months, which has been a wake-up call that it is never a bad time to reach out to friends and family.

Where to Find Me

http://Amazon.com/author/jonathanplucker

www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanplucker

https://twitter.com/JonathanPlucker

https://www.threads.net/@jonathanplucker