The Educator's Notebook

A weekly collection of education-related news from around the web.

Educator’s Notebook #531 (September 13, 2026)

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INTRODUCTION

  • PISA results, Alpha school, thriving colleges, oral exams, and more

    Another fascinating week!

    In the features: you may have seen headlines about the recent PISA results. These are worth digging into. Check out the OECD’s interactive report on the recent results to find the headline notes (reading and math scores are plummeting), but also to find some of the nuance further down. The interactive chart on AI use I find to be particularly revealing/affirming: students who use AI to summarize texts or draft writing score lower, but those who use AI to learn content score roughly the same or higher. This is an important insight and I think will be part of our dialog on AI for a long time.

    Also in the features, see an HBR post on leading in rapidly changing times.

    Elsewhere in this issue: find changes in who’s reading and how much, some higher ed institutions are flourishing, and more. Two more notes:

    1/2 What do we do with Alpha School? 

    It’s the latest manifestation of optimization culture in the form of a school. We saw it captured 25 years ago in David Brooks article in The Atlantic entitled “The Organization Kid”. It’s an achievement-oriented mindset that overlooks the relational, creative, holistic experience of being a human, and in the NAIS Jobs-to-be-Done framework for schools, it fits squarely in Job 4: “Help Me Realize My Plan for My Talented Child” while presenting as Jobs 1, 2, and 3. For a report on the lopsided construction of these schools, see the post in the pedagogy section on Alpha School’s bootcamp.

    All that said, what Alpha is demonstrating that is worth paying attention to — aside from what really effective marketing looks like — is that some elements of learning can in fact be transactional. Increasingly, some (not all) knowledge and skill acquisition can happen independently. We explore this in chapters 4 and 5 of Irreplaceable.  Couple this finding with the OECD’s finding above — that students often perform better when they use AI to learn rather than to write/simplify/summarize — and schools increasingly have the opportunity to explore what elements of learning in our communities might indeed benefit from technological support. The techlash right now is real and earned, but just as doing everything with tech is a mistake, so is throwing everything out.

    2/2 Are you in or near Western Pennsylvania?

    I’m glad to invite you to the reading of Schooled the Musical in October. Before you dismiss this as irrelevant (except those who are already invested in theater), Schooled is about what it’s like to be a student and teacher in our complicated, culture war times, and the reading in Pittsburgh will be the first reading of both Acts I and II together. Act I was performed at SXSW EDU this past March, and audience responses ranged from “Being from Loudon County, VA — this is exactly what we went through” to “A musical for our times, from the voice of young people who need to be listened to” to “the writer captured the souls of students hungry for relevancy and action.” The reading is on Sunday evening, October 18, at 6pm in Pittsburgh as part of the Elevate Learning conference, hosted by PAIS and Carlow University and supported by the Grable Foundation. Check out Elevate Learning for details. 

    These and more, enjoy!

    Peter

    PS. I’m happy to share a list of engagements coming up in the months ahead and would love to connect if you’ll be at any:

    September 23 (and 10/7, 10/21, 11/4, 11/18): “What the AI Moment Means for Good Teaching” – Academy for Teachers, online, based in NYC
    This five part online event is a virtual PD offering primarily for NYC teachers at Academy for Teachers member public, private, and charter schools — but teachers at non-member schools both in and beyond NYC are welcome to register for a small fee. Each session is two weeks apart. Join for all or any individual one.

    September 25-26: Architects of Tomorrow – CAFA PD Conference, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
    I’m so happy to join with a host of schools in Central Asia for future-oriented discussion about the role of AI in education.

    October 18-19: Elevate Learning: A Teaching & Learning Conference – PAIS, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
    This is doubly exciting, as Schooled the Musical will feature on October 18, and I’ll join a panel on the morning of the 19th for conversation about AI.

    October 22: Schools of the Future – HAIS, Hawaii Dept of Education, Honolulu, Hawaii
    Serving schools across Hawaii, this event is hosting a series of excellent, provocative, and inspiring discussions.  More information to come in the weeks ahead.

    Later events will be announced in future issues.

     

    How did students perform when using AI to help them learn? See the PISA report in the Features for more

     

     

    Browse and search over 17,000 curated articles from past issues online:

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FEATURED

  • The OECD’s PISA Results Are Fascinating For More Reasons Than The Headlines

    • OECD
    • 09/08/26

    “How AI use relates to student performance is complex, varying with how students use it and what for. PISA data show that students who use AI for specific schoolwork tasks, such as summarising texts, drafting or conducting research, attain lower scores in science than students who do not use AI. In these scenarios, students who do not use AI outperform those who do, on average, by around 20 points – equivalent to being around one year of schooling ahead of their peers. However, weekly users of AI for general purposes have similar performance outcomes to non-users. Students who regularly use AI for general purposes, and have learning opportunities at school to develop AI literacy skills, tend to have slightly higher scores in science. However, these opportunities are more common among socio-economically advantaged students, risking a growing AI divide.”

  • Change Is Faster And Bigger And More Frequent. How Do We Keep Up?

    • Harvard Business Review
    • 01/15/26

    “Leading through change is more difficult than ever because of the convergence of four factors: 1) not only is there a large volume of change, but changes are stacked, one on top of the other; 2) not only are changes happening faster, they’re continuous, without a start or end date; 3) not only are changes larger in scale; they’re interdependent; and 4) not only is change unpredictable, they’re externally driven by technology, geopolitical trends, and more. Gartner calls this “ungovernable change,” and has found that instead of coaching employees through each needed change, the most successful leaders are routinizing change, or treating it as an everyday business process.”

ASSESSMENT

ATHLETICS

CHARACTER

ELEMENTARY

HEALTH

HIGHER ED

HUMANITIES

PEDAGOGY

  • On Alpha School’s Boot Camp

    • Cognitive Resonance
    • 09/08/26

    “But what I cannot fully convey is how profoundly surreal it was to spend several days immersed in online conversations about boot camp, and for the first time contemplating what is actually happening at Alpha School right now. Because it seems to me that one of only two possibilities must be true: (1) The accounts and tweets are not authentic. It’s possible that Alpha School has created de facto “Potemkin students,” meaning that, while the accounts may be affiliated with actual students, the tweets are largely being directed or steered by Alpha School employees… (2) The alternative is that these accounts are authentic, and the tweets accurately reflect the activities of Alpha School’s boot camp, and student dispositions more broadly.”

READING/WRITING

  • “Prompts Can Be Poetic”

    • Mike Caulfield
    • 09/12/26

    “We spend so much time talking about how writing is thinking, and I believe that is true. But if writing is thinking, so is prompting, right? Sitting down, and trying to pick every word in that paragraph in a way that both binds two films and their vibe together while staying broad enough to let the unexpected come in.”

  • Carl Hendrick On The PISA Results: A “Reading Recession”

    • Carl Hendrick
    • 09/08/26

    “There was one finding however that I found particularly interesting and it’s a measure called the ‘hasty reader’ which describes students who make more than one error on the opening reading fluency task and then complete it faster than 99 per cent of accurate readers in the same country and language group. I think this metric, perhaps more than any other, is very revealing about why we are where we are in 2026 with reading.”

  • The Nonfiction Book Markey Appears To Be Collapsing

    • Biblioracle
    • 09/08/26

STEM

GENERAL

A.I. Update

A.I. UPDATE

  • The techlash grows, so does AI use by young people

    What a journey, this week and every week, in these extraordinary times we are living through.

    Recent developments in AI are pushing discourse to a fever pitch. As usual, the best path forward has nuance, while as usual, the dominant narratives are binary: tech is either a utopian prophecy or a morally repugnant existential threat. In a LinkedIn post, research scientist Mike Caulfield, from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, wrote: 

    Maybe I’m just being sour grapes here but I think it’s sad that while the evidence accumulates that teaching students rudiments of verification of AI outputs can improve outcomes there is zero money in that (that I know of, and really if anyone should know it would be me) and yet quite a lot of money for fomenting a techlash. 

    I sometimes wish, just for a few moments, that I wasn’t a detail person and felt comfortable selling people the anti-tech cope or utopian pipe dream that people so obviously desire. That like a lot of people out there I could just spend my days finding the latest outrage to spin people up and telling them to click subscribe. Seems like a better gig. But the truth is kind of boring; if you can figure out how best to use a particular piece of tech and how to teach that in a transferable way, people do better with it. Spending time figuring out how to do it well leads to better outcomes, as does spending time thinking through how to teach it. 

    Knowing this stuff won’t give you the visceral thrill of feeling like you are the Rebel Alliance… but it will help your students, maybe for the rest of their lives, which seems the important thing.

    To actually explore that nuanced middle space, check out either of the two features. Also, look at Harvard’s post in the Social section on the reasons young people are turning to AI for emotional support. What a time we are living in.

    These and more, enjoy!

    Peter

     

    What do young people say about why they turn to AI for emotional support? See the Social post for more.

TECH/AI: FEATURED

  • AI Works Best When You Redesign Your Workflow

    • Dr. Philippa Hardman
    • 09/10/26

    “There’s an increasing amount of talk about two different ways we can use AI: “bolting AI on” and “redesigning the workflow”. What does this actually mean? Here’s the 101. Bolting on means keeping the workflow you already have — the same tasks, in the same order, owned by the same people, with the same handoffs and checks — and giving people an AI tool to use inside it. The shape of the work doesn’t change. Individual tasks get faster. Redesigning means changing the shape of the work, so that the list of tasks, who does them, and where the checks sit all look different afterwards. Some work disappears from a person’s plate entirely. Runs of production work that used to pass through several hands become one AI-enabled chain.”

  • Research: What Is The Spectrum Of AI Tutor Engagement?

    • EdWeek
    • 08/28/26

    “People hear the term ‘AI tutor,’ and they think that is a young person engaging directly with a chatbot,” he said. “What our brief outlines is that AI tutors exist on an AI-human spectrum, and that spectrum exists on a range of relational intensity. Depending on where you fall on that range, there is either strong evidence to support [it] or very little evidence.”

TECH/AI: EDUCATION

TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK

TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT

TECH/AI: SOCIAL

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Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.

Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.

– Peter Nilsson

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