A watchful D.C. resident sent me a photo of something we haven’t seen in years; water flowing down the cascading fountain at Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park. NPS started work on the long-dry fountain late last year, as part of a broader project to refurbish the park.

Looking forward to reading this!

Current Opportunities at Vanderbilt Vanderbilt is committed to providing a meaningful, robust experience for postdocs. Below is a list of currently available postdoctoral opportunities. Postdocs interested in applying for a specific pos...

Vanderbilt seeks a Postdoctoral Scholar to support two grant-funded initiatives: the Improvement Scholars Network & the Network Health Project. Focuses on advancing improvement research & studying the development and effectiveness of education improvement networks. www.vanderbilt.edu/postdoc/pros...

This is very good and worth reading

Like Morgan, I think there's an opp for clear state guidance to prevent districts from making really bad choices about AI use in classrooms

I also worry that state AI policy in our current political context could entrench terrible decisions for a *lot* of kids

1/
"Silicon samples" are becoming more and more common in research and polling.

One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want.

The updated version of this preprint is now online!

THREAD🧵

arxiv.org/abs/2509.13397

Education research is profoundly and proudly pluralistic in its theoretical and methodological traditions. That’s a good thing! We study schools, school systems, and learning. We need every tool we can find to study those well.

…And we tolerate too much shoddy work in all of those traditions.

Colorized illustration of Black Washingtonians celebrating DC Emancipation Day in 1866 from Harper's Weekly.

Happy DC Emancipation Day!
 
Today, we honor the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the District and the liberation of more than 3,000 enslaved people.
 
We also reflect on the ongoing work to build a DC where freedom is fully realized—through equity, opportunity, and dignity for all.

But I’m working through some ideas, and, at the very least, it’s a problem worth working through together.

Keep an eye out for my upcoming book (The Long Division: How the Politics of Education Became Partisan). It’s currently under review at OUP and will hopefully be published early 2027.

5/5

In the immediate future, we’re going to need to find other avenues beyond bipartisan consensus politics to help make more schools serve more students more effectively.

I wish I had the answers about how to do this.

I don’t.

4/5

But you should be skeptical about visions of reassembling the NCLB coalition.

Depending on your view of the legacy of standards-based reform, that may be a good or a bad thing.

3/5

The institutional and cultural conditions simply aren’t there for a big bipartisan school reform redux.

There’s still space for cross-party convergence on specific issues (e.g., early literacy reforms, cellphone bans, maybe some more limits on tech in the early grades), and that’s important!

2/5

It’s a good thing when education policy ideas can garner big, bipartisan constituencies. Such reforms are more durable, widespread, and amenable to reflective, iterative updating. We should pursue and celebrate them.

But…

1/5

How immigration enforcement is harming US schools and students | Brookings Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj examines how aggressive immigration enforcement harms students' attendance, health, and academics.

New @Brookings commentary on the consequences of current immigration enforcement campaigns & attacks on immigrant communities for students & schools. www.brookings.edu/articles/how...

Congrats and well earned!

Post Doc at Uni Tübingen! 100% position for 3 (+3) years; they're looking for somebody to analyze large-scale longitudinal datasets in education research.

Expertise in machine learning is an advantage, commitment to research transparency desirable 😌 proficiency in German beneficial but not required

Racial Disparities and Black Parents’ School Preferences: Evidence from a Survey Experiment - The Urban Review Nearly half of Black parents have access to public school choice, but choice may not provide equitable and supportive school environments. Qualitative research documents Black parents worries that majority-White schools with more resources and higher test scores may over-discipline, underestimate, and exclude their children. Yet large-scale studies rarely examine what Black families desire in potential schools, including how they navigate potential tradeoffs between high school quality and denigrating school racial climates. This survey experiment examines the extent to which test score gaps and suspension gaps between Black students and their non-Black peers deter Black parents from choosing schools with higher overall test scores and lower overall suspension rates. We randomly assign a large, national sample of Black parents (N = 1,677) to examine a school profile vignette where the school has overall high academic achievement and low suspensions rates but includes either one, both, or neither academic and discipline gaps to assess how test score and suspension disparities affect Black parents’ school preferences and perceptions. We find that racial disparities in student discipline and academic outcomes, on average, diminish Black families’ desires to enroll in high-achievement schools and their perceptions of student belonging. These findings align with qualitative research showing that well-resourced, high-achieving schools are less appealing to Black families when they marginalize Black students and that schools’ unequal punishment of Black students shapes Black parents’ evaluations of potential educational spaces.

New research by Todd Hall, Jeremy Prim, @drjae.bsky.social, and me:

Black families are 10 percentage points less likely to choose an otherwise high-quality school when it has large racial disparities in test scores and student discipline.

Read the paper: doi.org/10.1007/s112...

1/2

The Cost of Over-Teaching Phonics In teaching reading, don’t miss the forest for the trees

Seems like kind of a big deal: "Researchers call this ability to implicitly pick up patterns and apply them the 'self-teaching mechanism,' or 'statistical learning'—and many say it’s underrecognized within the science-of-reading movement."

www.educationnext.org/cost-of-over...

🎉🏫New paper! 🏫🎉 "High Schools and the Uneven Rise in American Opportunity" by myself, Alison Doxey, and Ezra Karger (@ezrakarger.bsky.social)

www.peternencka.com/assets/high_...

www.nber.org/papers/w35068

To clarify: blocking abusive accounts is good advice and the correct thing to do. It’s the broader dynamic on bsky—not your suggestion—that’s funny.

Publicly disagreeing with me for praising the value of public disagreement has some real poetry to it

Some comedy in there. My comment wasn’t criticized for being banal or sentimental (guilty as charged) but for being incorrect in substance.

We all suffer from epistemic closure these days, but this place has a real knack for turning that into a virtue.

Was just the subject of my very first bluesky pile-on for what was [in my opinion at least] a pretty innocuous suggestion that, in a democracy, it is both good and necessary to talk to people with whom you disagree

Sounds about right

Opinion | Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy

I know not everyone likes Klein, but this is good:

“Conversation is not a reward to be bestowed on those with whom we agree; it’s a necessary habit in a democracy. The point is not to find agreement so much as to deepen understanding.”

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/o...

The Politics of Administrative Ease: Public Access to Local Special Education Information What political and administrative resources contribute to the realization of rights in the United States? We examine this puzzle in the context of rights to education for students with disabilities by measuring the administrative ease of accessing local special education information: the extent to which governments actively reduce learning costs and make information accessible.

I'm excited to share our latest EdWorking paper, "The Politics of Administrative Ease: Public Access to Local Special Education Information" (w/ @lindseykaler.bsky.social
and co-authors).
edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1447
#SpecialEducation #EdResearch
@annenberginstitute.bsky.social

Congrats Abi! They're lucky to have you!

Opinion | The Last Thing Democrats Need Is More Policy Plans Democrats need to become a real political party again — and that’s no easy feat.

“Policy-as-politics doesn’t work,” Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman write about the Democrats’ current trajectory. “Parties can, and historically have, forged stronger, more sustainable connections with voters through other means” — like the art of mass politics.

Veiled Power: How Rosenwald Teachers Quietly Shaped the Civil Rights Movement Omar Wasow∗ Jacob M. Grumbach∗ April 1, 2026 Abstract What precipitates the collapse of seemingly durable social orders like Jim Crow? During the 1920s, approximately 5,000 “Rosenwald Schools” were built across the rural South through a partnership between philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and Black communities who raised matching funds, donated land, and petitioned local governments. Local elites saw vocational training that would preserve the racial order. We argue Black educators used this accommodationist cover to build veiled capacity: organizational infrastructure for collective action behind a veil of compliance. Counties with more Rosenwald Schools show greater civil rights protest in the 1960s. Mediation analysis reveals that pre-existing social capital predicted protest through Rosenwald teacher placements, not enrollment. Instrumental variable models suggest the effect is not driven by community selection. Moving from no Rosenwald teachers to the 75th percentile predicts 45% more protest. The political effects of education may depend less on what elites intend than on what educators build where elites cannot see.

Excited to share new paper w/ @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social: "Veiled Power: How Rosenwald Teachers Quietly Shaped the Civil Rights Movement"

The puzzle: did ~5,000 segregated schools built in rural South emphasizing “manual labor” strengthen or weaken Jim Crow? 🧵 omarwasow.com/wasow_grumba...

Survey shows alarming drop in working conditions for teachers: What are we doing about it? | Brookings Post-pandemic teacher working conditions have plummeted as classroom disruptions surge, fueling a crisis in U.S. schools.

Alarming drops in working conditions for teachers during and after the pandemic www.brookings.edu/articles/sur...

Repaying their sacrifice: how ideology shapes Asian American educational success and STEM career choice Asian Americans as a racial category achieve educational and socioeconomic attainments that seemingly defy traditional theories of racial disadvantage. While acknowledging the ways that the model m...

Check out my newly published piece on Asian Americans and education! This is an attempt at understanding how family-driven discourses about the purpose of education and the responsibility of the child shape the educational trajectories of Asian Americans.

www.tandfonline.com/eprint/VMSG2...