The Adventure Begins!

November 2024

Thanks for subscribing to my monthly newsletter! With traditional means of communication feeling less and less relevant, and many alternatives no longer passing muster (remember Twitter?!?), I’ve been searching for ways to share my work and other cool stuff that crosses my radar screen.

So I’m giving the substack-and-podcast approach a try. We’ll start monthly with both (the podcast will probably kick off in January), although my colleagues who know about such things think twice a month is closer to the sweet spot for this. We shall see!

You can do me several favors:

1. Let me know if this format and content works for you!

2. Pass it to friends and colleagues who may enjoy it.

3. Suggest topics you’d like to see tackled both here and in the podcast.

If you’re wondering why “Everyone Has a Plan” for the title, check out the “About” link on my Substack home page.

Without further ado …

Something Short

This is my favorite recent piece, in which I dive into the educational lessons to be learned from the sitcom Young Sheldon as it wrapped up its seven-season run. It feels like I put more time into this than most of my books. But seriously, I love how it worked out, and big tip o’ the hat to Mike Petrilli, who came up with the idea, and Michael Poor, my editor for the post at Education Next.

The series finale elicited a number of similar pieces, and some really annoyed me. There was a lot of grandstanding about how the show portrayed bright kids and their families in a bad light, or even that his parents didn’t do the best job. My brief response to those perspectives can be summarized in four words: It’s a TV show! I’m reminded of a show in the early 2000s with the tagline, “Like your life, but funnier.” A friend remarked, “It better be funnier than my life,” which struck me as a good point. Entertainment should be entertaining! Of course they exaggerated things. Would you watch it if they didn’t?

What impresses me about YS is that it uses the craziness of the set-up to convey important truths about families, education, and how we react to life’s victories and setbacks. If you’re using it as a guide for raising your family, I can’t help you. But let’s not get that serious about it. It was a fun show, and the writing and actors are amazing!

Something a Bit More Involved

Here’s a recent paper, Reducing Excellence Gaps, written with my colleagues Melanie Meyer and Ashley Shen. I’ve studied excellence gaps - achievement gaps at advanced levels of performance - for about 15 years now. I was watching educators and policymakers scramble to address “achievement gaps,” all over the country, yet no one was even giving lip service to differences in achievement at the top levels.

I worried that sent a really bad message about students’ capabilities. If all of our systems declare victory when we help a low-income student reach, say, grade level performance in math, what message are we sending to that student and her peers about her ability to perform at even higher levels? Having a goal of “grade-level performance” for our students feels like the recipe for mediocrity.

In 2014, Scott Peters and I published our book, Excellence Gaps in Education, which proposed a research-based model for interventions to improve the advanced performance of students who often don’t have the right mix of opportunities to excel. Fast forward a decade, and Melanie and I were talking about the need to study the ensuing research to see if the model still stands up.

It does! We tinkered with it as a result of this paper, but it’s not that complicated: Provide expanded opportunities for advanced learning, allow students to move at their own pace (acceleration) and learn with peers working at similar levels (readiness grouping), be inclusive rather than exclusive, etc. If you can’t access the paper but would like a copy, email me at jplucker@jhu.edu.

Something Recent that Intrigued Me

In this section, I’ll point you to a handful of recent things that caught my eye. These are perspectives that I find provocative, and your mileage may vary. This month, I have three recommendations:

Why Isn’t K-12 Curriculum Better than it is?

My colleague David Steiner recently shared some thoughts about high-quality instructional materials. Research suggests that such materials make a huge difference in learning, but you just don’t see a strong emphasis on having the highest-quality curriculum and activities in our schools. David, who has vast experience as a scholar, dean, and state education commissioner, has been emphasizing the need for rigorous, high-quality curriculum for decades, and this piece dives deeply into the possible reasons why such materials aren’t more ubiquitous. I’d note that the field of advanced education has developed high-quality curricula for a long time, yet little of it seems to make it into classrooms (at least, not as much as it should). David’s hypotheses on why this is the case gave me a lot to think about.

Whither the U.S. Department of Education?

The policy world is swirling with discussions about the future of the U.S. Department of Education. I was going to write a piece on it, but (a) no one really has any idea what will happen, (b) the politics here are murky because education is not on the top of the new administration’s agenda, and (c) this piece by Mark Schneider is probably the best anyone is going to produce. He focuses less on “if” and more on “what,” which makes it very interesting. I don’t think eliminating U.S. ED is a great idea, because it won’t make hardly any difference given the angst, chaos, and financial cost involved. But Mark’s piece made me think that some pieces of ED probably do need to be moved (e.g., financial aid to Treasury, OCR to Justice, research to NSF). Maybe the motto should be “Right-size, don’t eliminate!”

Question Your Assumptions About Advanced Education

One thing that drives me to distraction is being confronted about how awful gifted education is. The critics talk about lack of equal opportunity, elitism, and on and on, and I always surprise them at the end of their rant by saying, “Yeah, I agree.” Then I note that they’re describing advanced ed models from the 1980s and 1990s, when we didn’t have all the great theory and research that we have now. Dealing with stereotypes and myths is part of the war of ideas, but geez, it gets tiring. So I was very pleased to read Brandon Wright’s new policy brief, which examines assumptions about advanced services. Brandon tackles common claims by examining the relevant research, and he makes strong, clear claims throughout the brief. He also discusses part of the brief on this podcast.

Something I Found to be Cool

I’m an unrepentant fan of pop culture. Subscribers will need to endure my not-quite-serious recommendations for cool stuff each month. For this first issue, you’re getting two cool things!

Taylor Sheridan TV Shows (and the occasional movie)

Sheridan’s TV shows are a warm meal on a cold day. I came to his work late, not realizing he’d written the best modern western, Hell or High Water. I watched the prequels to Yellowstone (1883 and 1923) before making it to the Yellowstone Ranch for the first time. 1883 is haunting and beautiful, 1923 is pulpy, Yellowstone is a soap opera with horses and Kevin Costner, and Lioness is a spy story with great battle scenes and a sprinkle of world-class overacting. I’ve loved them all.

This stuff really is comfort food. You either know what’s coming (and enjoy it when he takes you there), or you think, “It would be cool if this happened next” about two scenes before he makes that thing happen. (Great example: Wouldn’t it be crazy if that package they’re keeping in frame in the background was a bomb, which would make almost no sense given the plot thus far? Five seconds later: “Wait, don’t open that package!”) I guess that makes it fan service, which critics frown upon, but it’s never boring! These shows are definitely stuff-to-have-on-while-you’re-doing-something-else, and we all need that in our lives.

Baby Cobra! (kinda)

Funny things fascinate me. In part because funny people tend to be very creative, but also because the science of humor is interesting - and broadly applicable to lots of other things in life. We tend to focus on the art of it all, but something that is very funny almost always has a lot of thought and work behind it.

For example, this analysis of Ali Wong’s Baby Cobra special is first-rate (fair warning: both the special and analysis are R-rated). I’ve seen versions of this article in text form, but this particular presentation is my favorite because there are plenty of clips to illustrate the authors’ points. If you haven’t seen Baby Cobra on Netflix, I recommend watching it before reading the analysis.

When people ask me about how to give good talks, I often point to things like this because giving a talk is a performance. You can be boring and still give a good talk, but being at least mildly entertaining is the spoonful of sugar that makes an audience connect with your ideas. There are lots of ways to get to an entertaining story, but workshopping it a dozen or more times is generally the most effective strategy. You figure out what works, what doesn’t work, when the pacing is too slow or too fast, how you can improve the structure, etc. Over time, it gets better and better. No one gets lightning in a bottle at the jump - there’s a reason why comedians film their sets at the end of a tour and not the beginning!

Some Things to Consider

I’ll stick announcements about events here each month.

There are so many webinars, symposia, etc., on the possible impact of the election. Most of the national stuff is mildly interesting, but the last one I intended was essentially a bunch of smart people making pretty wild guesses. If you’re looking for a palate cleanser, check out this short webinar that that I did with two graduates of our Ed Policy Program at Hopkins, Sabrina Solares-Hand and Jenny Butcher. We focused on state-level implications of the (at the time, upcoming) election, which are generally easier to predict. One of the speakers had the worst wifi connection in history at the time of the recording, and for that he apologizes in advance (although the Hopkins At Home tech team did a great job smoothing out the glitches in post-production).

The annual convention of the National Association for Gifted Children will happen later this week in Seattle. A big highlight is the Celebration of Excellence on Friday night, when the field’s major honors are awarded. A special treat for me this year is that so many of the awardees are my friends and colleagues: Anne Rinn, one of my former students, will receive the Distinguished Scholar Award. Sarah Caroleo, a current student, and Ashley Shen, a Hopkins’ master’s alumna now working on her doctorate at the University of North Texas, will be honored with Doctoral Student Awards. Rachel Mun, a professor at UNT, will receive the Early Scholar Award, and Cheryl McCullough from Arlington (VA) Public Schools is being honored as an outstanding Gifted Coordinator. There are several other well-deserving awardees, but it is especially exciting to see my close colleagues and friends have their talent and hard work acknowledged in this way.

Jade Plant of the Month

One of my nieces once gasped when she saw me take a picture in portrait mode - apparently it is a photo trick that “only old people” use. Well, this jade plant deserves the movie star treatment, so apologies to my niece.

This beauty is a classic crassula ovata variety, fairly typical for a houseplant but not a specimen you’d find outdoors. It has been growing slowly in a shared succulent pot for a few years, but it was watered more than normal this summer and more than doubled in size. Time for its own pot! It doesn’t get much direct light, so it doesn’t have the classic red edges of a happy jade plant. But look at that green, glossy color! Just delightful.

(If you’re thinking, surely he doesn’t have enough jade plants to keep this up for more than a few months, well, you may be surprised.)

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