By Sherman Dorn on November 13, 2025
On one of the social media platforms I visit, there was a set of threads recently on the science of reading and three-cuing, a now-disdained prompt for early readers having difficulty with a word. As I understand it, three-cuing is a set of three prompts to guess the word. I’m not a fan of encouraging students to flail, so I’m not all that disappointed that this is now discouraged. But the discourse around it suggests that the vast majority of elementary teachers were using three-cuing in the first part of this century, and that it was destroying the teaching of reading.
There’s nothing but anecdotal evidence I’ve seen about the extent of three-cuing, and so I’m not sure how seriously to take the claim of its near-universal use. Surveys of instructional practices tend to be self-reported and related to specific research projects, not mapping out what teachers are doing in detail nationwide. But that is also true for almost every instructional technique in history: we don’t really know how widespread any instructional approach was. The best we can do is to know if there’s evidence it did exist in a time period and some evidence about the geographic and other dimensions of extent. I think of Barbara Finkelstein (1989) and Larry Cuban (1993) as the historians who have tackled century-long sweeps in teacher practices (Finkelstein for the 19th, Cuban for the 20th), and while their language is not the same as mine, that’s roughly the nature of their claims.
Continue reading “Repertoire”
Posted in Education policy, History
By Sherman Dorn on July 18, 2025
In my social media feeds recently, I’ve seen debate over the decision by the American Federation of Teachers to partner with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic to open a National Academy for AI Instruction. The July 8 press release describes the goal as “a national model for AI-integrated curriculum and teaching that puts educators in the driver’s seat.” Many AFT members are upset with what they see as an ideological caving to the hype over an inherently bad technology. I’ve also seen other educators applauding the AFT for taking the initiative in an area where there has been too little active involvement by either of the national teachers unions.
Continue reading “The AFT’s initiative on LLMs, and teachers’”
Posted in Education policy, History
By Sherman Dorn on July 14, 2025
I write this from Seoul, at the end of a week-long stay that began for me with the International Conference on Education Research and is ending with reading the news that the U.S. Supreme Court has granted yet another emergency order to relieve the Trump administration of the obligations under the law, in this case removing a lower-court order requiring it to employ enough Education Department staff to fulfill its legal obligations.
The contemporary history of South Korea has witnessed four elected presidents being prosecuted for crime, three jailed for at least a time after a conviction (the fourth committed suicide during the investigation), and it looks like Yoon Suk Yeol, the former president who was impeached and removed from office for attempting to pull a coup last year, will also be prosecuted. In the Republic of Korea, its Constitutional Court is the trial venue after an impeachment by parliament, and the court voted unanimously in April to remove Yoon. South Korea is a country that holds its leadership accountable for flawed behavior.
In contrast, the current Supreme Court has not only been feckless in its current string of decisions that give a blank check to the Trump administration, but in a run of majority opinions over two decades, the court has eviscerated the public’s interest in fighting corruption. From public bribery cases to clean and fair elections, I can think of only one majority opinion that supported the public’s efforts to fight corruption on the merits — and in that one, which upheld Arizona’s independent redistricting commission, Chief Justice John Roberts dissented. If my memory serves correctly, the Chief Justice has never supported an anti-corruption effort on its merits.
The judiciary should be independent, not imperial. In an area of policy, one of the court’s roles is to say, “You can’t achieve this goal by this particular method.” But when a string of decisions strikes down a whole host of ways through which the legislature and executive have tried to address a broad public concern, the court is essentially forbidding any movement on the goal. I have no idea whether Chief Justice Roberts has intended to enable corruption, but his court absolutely has done so, and has all but declared public concern about corruption to be impermissible.
To that string of decisions on substance, we should add its actions thus far in the Trump administration to relieve pressure to follow the law, and in doing so undermine the efforts of their lower-court colleagues. Today’s decision is nominally a procedural one, but it is the latest in a series of procedural, emergency orders vacating lower-court decisions, in this case one that mandated that the Trump administration have enough employees in a Department of Education to fulfill the obligations imposed by law. As Justice Sotomayor wrote in dissent, the emergency order “hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out. The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.”
We do not need to know the thinking of the court’s majority to judge that it has failed the country.
Posted in Education policy, Politics
By Sherman Dorn on May 23, 2025
When I last wrote a blog entry, it was at the end of 2023. Six weeks before, while I was in Miami for a meeting, my daughter had found my wife unresponsive one morning and called 911. Elizabeth had extremely low blood sugar and came home after half a day in the ER, alive thanks to my daughter’s quick action and attentive EMTs and the ER medical staff.
My wife died 9 months later. What we did not know at the time of that ER visit was that she was starting to incubate multiple lung infections, which her primary care physician did not catch, and she landed in the hospital in mid-June where the staff discovered the infections: one “normal” infection that was treatable with a standard antibiotic regimen, the stubborn fungal infection Valley fever, and a mycobacterium infection (a noninfectious relative of TB). She came home for two weeks, but her body could not fight some of the complications, and she died last July 22nd.
Elizabeth and I started dating in September 1984 and were married for 36 years. She had her own career, or rather two careers in education, in early childhood education and K-12 special education, and was often amused by academic perspectives on education, including mine. She was a critical friend in the best sense of the term, and that is one of the many ways that I miss her.
She died a year and a day after our dear friend Barbara Shircliffe, and a little over two months after one of my nephews. My break in writing publicly here reflects the last few years of loss. I will likely restart writing in the near future, or that is my intent. Life is precious and fragile, and there are no guarantees.
Posted in Personal
By Sherman Dorn on December 29, 2023
A little more than five years ago, I traveled with my then-student Wooyeong Kim to the University of Maryland’s Hornbake Library. The archive there has thousands of feet of shelved material on the American history of broadcasting, much of it on public broadcasting, and we spent the entire week in the papers of the Children’s Television Workshop. Now Sesame Workshop, it’s the nonprofit that created Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and 3-2-1 Contact. ((Dr. Kim graduated in 2022.))
My projects aren’t usually inspired by a new student, but this was. Wooyeong had enrolled in our educational policy and evaluation PhD program with an interest in the history of national policy in South Korea. He was my first student in more than a decade wanting to focus on the history of education. I had a number of ongoing projects, but none in the history of ed, let alone national policy setting, and I figured he could see a project from the ground up. Time to find a project! I looked for areas of national policy where there had not been a significant amount written from an education history perspective. Broadcasting stuck out as an obvious topic, though at first I had no focus other than the intersection of broadcasting, education, and national policy. ((Most of the existing literature sat squarely within media history, or educational technology as used in schools.)) As I said, I wanted Wooyeong to see a project from its messy origins. When he landed in Phoenix a few weeks before his program started, we had lunch and talked about the fall semester; his schedule wouldn’t let him travel until the end of the term, so he took an independent study reading with me, and then we headed to Maryland in December. ((We also decided on Zotero as the way to manage documents, and the workflow we set up was immediately successful. We read a few hundred documents that week, took notes on 159, and scanned most of the ones we took notes on.))
This isn’t exactly the five-year anniversary of the project, but it’s time to take stock.
Continue reading “Educational broadcasting history project update”
Posted in Education policy, History, Research