iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I have really stark memories of those rides home … The story that lingers is actually from the end of my HS career: I was named second team all-league my senior year and dad’s first comment was, “Wow - how’d you get that? Must’ve been that last game you played (IN THE STATE TOURNAMENT).” 🤦🏾‍♂️

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Chanea Bond @heymrsbond.com · 04/10/2026

Thinking about the moms who never imagined their tiny little boys could grow up to be monsters. Praying they love their sons enough to demand accountability. This is about Cornell, but it’s also about America.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

As troubling as that lack of active teachers is, it’s almost more troubling that the vast majority of corps members they do have on the list are CEOs / thought leaders / entrepreneurs. Given that there’s no shortage of TFA’ers still teaching, what does *that* say about how they define “success”?

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

There is a moment at the very very end of Abdul El-Sayed's podcast with Ezra Klein (book recommendation section) where he talks about the idea of "speaking truth to pain" and this will be staying with me for an extremely long time. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/o...

But there’s also something about truth to pain. We talk a lot about truth to power, but I think it’s actually a lot harder to speak truth to pain. I say that as someone who went to medical school, realizing that in a lot of our politics right now, we’ve got to get a lot better at speaking truth to pain if we’re going to get through some of these challenges that we have.

What does “truth to pain” mean?

It’s one thing to look power in the eye and say: You’re wrong about this. But there’s a way in which pain is very difficult to reason with. Because when somebody is in their pain, they’re in their trauma. They see that pain, and they may not see what’s causing it.

I remember just very explicitly being in a trauma ward with a gunshot wound patient and watching this big guy with his hand on his gunshot wound. All the folks are trying to pull his hand off his pain, that point of his gunshot wound, this clear vulnerability.

And this emergency room doctor had the presence of mind to be like: Everyone, stop. And she looks him in the eyes, and she’s like: I get that really hurts, and I’m so sorry that you’re here. You don’t want to be here. We don’t want you to be here. But if you don’t let us fix this, you could die. So I’m going to take your hand, and I’m going to move it off, OK? Because I need to get there so that you can live.

She was speaking truth to pain. He understands he’s at the hospital, he needs care, but he also doesn’t want anybody to touch the wound. Which is a natural thing. And I think it is a really great metaphor for how we think about a lot of these challenges we talked about today.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

All I’ll say about it (with enormous personal gratitude as well): An education org celebrating 35 years with a roster full of CEOs, charter school leaders, and entertainers doesn’t actually have much interest in that question to begin with. And I’m curious about questions they *would* answer.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Was in DC visiting family this past weekend and was staying with an elder who still gets actual folded papers with news typed onto it (I believe these were called “newspapers” in the 1900s). I swear someone was just setting me up to enrage me with this WaPo story 🤦🏾‍♂️ What are we doing here folks?!

Front of Washington Post business section from 9/27/26 with the headline, “The algorithm knows you’re a new parent.”

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Faux engagement — the favorite metric of every compliance-oriented “leader” — because she couldn’t possibly have seen evidence of learning by any reasonable definition in the context she described 🤦🏾‍♂️

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Let me take my educator hat off for a second and just respond to this as a parent …

static.klipy.com

Anger Inside Out

Alt: Anger Inside Out

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Trevor Aleo @mraleosays.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

There are many reasons to take issue with the NYT article making the rounds, but one of them is the fact it treats incredibly complex, abstract, & contested methods/approaches that require specialized training, implementation, etc. & treat them like they’re an app you install to make scores go 📈.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

When people say leaving the profession /going on strike / dissatisfaction isn’t entirely about money, this is exactly what they’re talking about — there’s a built-in disrespect for teachers even among those who have a vested interest in supporting them. It would be stunning if not so pervasive.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I was talking to teacher whose administrators are constantly applying pressure about the math data… and yet no matter how well his class performs, it only ever matters if the school, area, and district level data is good. It’s an absurd hamster wheel, but more importantly it’s just disrespectful.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

For some reason this doesn’t even make me feel old because this legit feels as though it could only be an artifact from a completely different era - that was an incredible time to be a young hip-hop fan and there’s just nothing to approximate it now.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I don’t have a good answer for that — it’s one of those things that’s inescapable. But I think it starts with building a language aligned with a humanizing vision of schooling… and maybe that’s the origin of the problem: if your vision is entirely data/test/score driven, you’ve already lost.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Totally random thought on the use of data in schools: Data is good. Data-driven decisions can support equity. But it’s also a slippery slope to rigidly technocratic mindsets where nothing outside of data is appreciated and student/teacher input is ignored — we have to guard against that.

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

If you care about the development of the American mind, you need to pay attention to K-12 curriculum in a way that takes it seriously. Lots of people, many of them unqualified, are doing this and having a big influence in blue and red states.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

That’s exactly it: it’s like offering someone a soothing lotion for a chronic disease. We’re just trying to feel better about it rather than addressing the underlying rot.

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MathIsLife @damianmolinari.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

SFUSD was under a court ordered desegregation for years, and while it may have addressed some issues, our schools were still rife with inequities. White supremacy is a rot from within that can't be addressed by moving students around.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The lost opportunity in her work is to explore *why* her actions as a NYT journo didn’t work. *Why* Ts in an underfunded resegregated school are constantly leaving. *Why* a single principal’s best effort wasn’t enough. It’s frustrating to see her lay the groundwork and arrive at the same place.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

All of that is why this 2018 quote should not just be read as hubris, but an extension of that misguided faith in individual acts to correct a system: “A NYT reporter in a high-poverty school f-ing changes the school…I can go to that school and say there is a problem and it gets fixed immediately.”

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The problem evident in the post-Brown era is that desegregation was necessary but not sufficient—there are way too many unaddressed systemic factors + political countermeasures. Underlying most of them, as she identified in her 2019 piece, is unyielding white supremacy.

dianeravitch.net

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Busing Did Not Fail, We Did

In this article, Nikole Hannah-Jones reviews the history of racial desegregation and the term “busing.” This article is a good reason to subscribe to the New York Times. Nikole Hannah-Jones …

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Clearly, desegregation is an ethical pursuit. But her fundamental belief that desegregation is a *successful* project allows her to believe that individuals simply engaging it differently will yield the outcomes we all seek. And unfortunately, there’s just ample evidence to the contrary.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

First, we need to do more to reckon with *whether* Brown v Board has been a successful educational project. I’ve worked in schools in 3 different states that are 95%+ Black and highly underfunded (no AC, lead in water). NHJ identifies failures, but pursues individual solutions. That’s not enough.

unbounded.org

The Complexion of Teaching and Learning - Episode Five: Brown v. Board’s Double-Edged Sword

UnboundEd · The Complexion of The Teaching and Learning - Episode 5 - “Brown v. Board’s Double-Edged Sword” In this episode, titled “Brown v. Board’s...

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

A lingering thought about this alluded to elsewhere: A through line in NHJ’s work is that school desegregation has been successful, but individuals can make or break it—it’s present in her 2019 piece about busing in response to Kamala Harris’ viral debate moment. That’s a problematic position.

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Trevor Aleo @mraleosays.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

David Backer is spot on here. For anyone interested in fine-grained leftist analysis of education policy, he is a must-follow. bsky.app/profile/scho...

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

And that highlights my primary gripe with all of NHJ’s work: I’m not usually that guy who harps on education journalists who aren’t actually educators, but it’s really hard to read her work without noticing that because she tries to make systemic claims based on personal observations.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Agreed - nice take on teaching and learning (and grading), but the gym analogy didn’t do a whole lot for him imho. I found it ironic that he kept returning to the limitations of the analogy yet continued to come back to the analogy anyway… 🤷🏾‍♂️

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I caught that too (& have seen some extrapolate that to commentary on unions as well… which…yikes 😬). But as someone who has worked in very similar schools, I’m not opposed to her observations, but making that interpretation requires a broader analysis of teachers’ working conditions that’s absent.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I strongly recommend that everyone — especially educators — go read NHJ’s latest NYT Mag article reflecting on the schooling choices she made as a prominent education journalist for her own daughter … I have A LOT to say about the article, but the quoted post/thread sums up my thoughts well…

nytimes.com

In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? (Gift Article)

A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.

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Anna Gifty @itsafronomics.blacksky.app · 20/09/2026

I guess my question while reading this was: why the insistence that individual proximity would have addressed systemic gaps?

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Marcus Luther @marcusluther.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

“In my class of 39” shouldn’t be allowed to be something teachers say

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This whole article is outstanding, but I really want to focus on the intro because tech fetishes are nothing new new, even if the contours are. And, imho, it comes from the misguided obsession we have with preparing kids for an unknown future instead of focusing on the humanity they present us with.

Excerpt from the article:

“l've been around the education innovation block a few times, having started my teaching career in Silicon Valley in the late 1980s. I was one of the first teachers to pilot the Apple Classroom of Tomorrow when we thought HyperCard (an early stab at hyperlinked media) and laser discs could transform high school classrooms (not so much). I founded and ran the first Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound Charter School and helped support one of the first Edison Schools.
While I'm a natural skeptic about
"revolutionary" school designs, I do think we need to rethink most of the traditional models of schooling with a teacher standing in front of a group of 20-30 kids.”

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This article highlights something that I don’t think we discuss enough when talking about school closures: predatory privatization. Under-enrollment is often a symptom, not the disease; school closures not only fail to cure the disease, but this research suggests they amplify its effects.

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MathIsLife @damianmolinari.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This part of the new district classroom walk-through rubric made me experience all of the emotions. Laughed out loud > offended > a little angry > worried about what this means for academic freedom and making decisions based on the students I teach.

Indicator is about use of adopted materials with highest scores from evidence of using materials and lower scores from not using materials, which evidently leads to lack of coherence and straying from the standards.

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John Downes-Angus @johndownesangus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

This would be a difficult story to report, because nobody would want to go on the record about it, but the actually important story about American schools is the persistence of thousands of teachers who give their kids what we know they need despite the barrage of mandates, standards, tests, etc—

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Charles Hughes @charleshughes2.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

There is no more renewable resource in the United States than wrongheaded takes by writers who confidently use country music as a simple symbol of rurality without having a clue about the music or seemingly anything else. If only we could harness such empty pontificating as a fuel source...

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

This is how it’s done.

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

On the same day Ted Cruz gets roundly booed by Texas fans, Abdul El-Sayed has Michigan fans running over to shake his hand. Please tell us more about who's popular with Real Americans™

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National Security Counselors 🕵 @nationalsecuritylaw.org · 13/09/2026

Saoirse is in an afterschool program, and today she excitedly told me all about the SMART test for evaluating the credibility of information (source, motivation, author, review, two-sources). I can think of a lot of adults who would benefit from this class designed for 4th and 5th graders.

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Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I am tired of people saying we can’t win in front of the Supreme Court. I’m annoyed by those who say my firm is too partisan to be effective. Today we won a huge redistricting fight before SCOTUS and a ballot access case before the Nebraska Supreme Court. The lesson: When we fight we win.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Someone could construct a pretty dope syllabus about AI and society with this meme as the centerpiece …

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

“Hate” is not too strong a word to describe my feelings about rushed curriculum implementation — how in the world do you expect kids to improve whatever nonsense outcomes you have if teachers aren’t prepped? “Wow, we need to ask teachers about this 🤔” should not be a post-implementation revelation 🤦🏾‍♂️

chalkbeat.org

Philadelphia spent $25 million on a new reading curriculum. But there are already problems.

Philadelphia is beginning its third year with a new reading curriculum. A new report highlights problems with how school leaders first rolled it out.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

This idea has come up for me a LOT lately and this comment was WAY too resonant: “Democracy requires a certain amount of enjoyment of arguing…rather than demonizing your opponent…the most shocking thing about public education was how undemocratic it was...It was entirely top-down dictatorship.”

podcasts.apple.com

Episode 40: "Changing the World Is Possible" with Deborah Meier and Matt Alexander

Podcast Episode · Street Data Pod: Imagining the Next Generation of Education · June 18 · 43m

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

I’ve been a part of 2 IEP meetings recently in which district reps either insulted parents or stood up and yelled at them for asserting themselves. In reflecting on mediating those situations, I’m left considering the impact of systemic pressure for illusory compliance with policy over human need 😞

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Marcus Luther @marcusluther.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I'll keep it simple: I'm very grateful for LAUSD and NYC public schools for taking an intentional, clear stance around limiting AI for students, classrooms and schools. 🙏 Yes, let's keep talking and learning—but we also need leadership. To be very clear: this is what leadership looks like.

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Nate @jessenathaniel.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I definitely fell into the “pushed to accelerate in math and now feel unprepared” group… and interestingly a large part of that was due to me testing well. I was definitely a case study in how test performance didn’t reflect conceptual understanding and ultimately undermined learning.

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Nick Covington @covingtonedu.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Exactly. If there's a threshold where the quest for perfect scientific efficiency begins to dehumanize — if teaching & learning are about more than effectiveness & efficiency — then we need tools in our toolkit to understand, navigate, and do the messy relational human stuff well, too. 🤷

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