By Sherman Dorn on December 6, 2025
Inevitability is a common rhetorical ploy in education. To Thomas Edison, film would inevitably replace textbooks. In the 1960s, B.F. Skinner said that teaching machines were inevitably going to replace teachers. In 2012, massive open online courses (MOOCs) were inevitably going to take over higher education. Pick your initiative, and you can almost always find someone who channels the Borg: resistance is futile.
The Borg trope is wrong for many reasons. Few things are anywhere close to inevitable other than the heat death of the universe billions of years from now, or our personal mortality. Inevitability is often a rhetorical cover for what advocates cannot defend on their merits, especially in education. When someone tells me that resistance is futile, I look for clues to other dynamics: who is bearing the risk, who is actively shifting the potential risks, what might magnify inequalities, and where is the money?
Continue reading “When others channel the Borg, look for the bagmen and the Borgias”
Posted in Education policy
By Sherman Dorn on November 30, 2025
On November 26, Arizona State University featured in a Wall Street Journal article written by Elizabeth Collins, one of their national political reporters based in Phoenix, and Douglas Belkin, a Journal higher ed reporter. This was not the first time my university employer has been prominently mentioned in a Journal article in 2025: On June 20, President Michael Crow’s op-ed argued for the national benefits of international students at American universities, and on October 17, ASU was listed as one of the universities in discussion with the Trump administration over the Trump “compact” as the idea of the compact was falling apart. Collins and Belkin were two of the authors of the October article, along with Natalie Andrews, the Journal‘s White House correspondent.
Continue reading “Arizona State University and Trump”
Posted in Academic freedom, Arizona, Higher education, The academic life
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