Nick Covington

"We know scripts also do not make actors, musicians, and surgeons equally interchangeable...We can tell the difference between a piano roll and a human at the keyboard." What the Script Can't Write: covingtonedu.substack.com/p/what-the-s...

Sitting does me no good. A standing desk was the best investment for both my back and my productivity. When I feel my attention start to slip and I'm stuck in a rut during the day, I've got a little 10 minute walking loop that sorts me out 80% of the time. Why keep students bound to a desk?

My hot take is that physical engagement *is* cognitive engagement and we should be doing more to get students physically engaged in learning. That could just look like a walk and talk!

I think the folks in this camp see teachers like missionaries—well intentioned people who care but probably weren’t “smart enough” for other careers. Easy to see how that view would align with paternalistic forms of managerialism that entrust curriculum to the “real experts” in the private sector.

Teachers only focus on a scale of one classroom at a time. It's an interesting challenge though. One more suited for those that work at a "greater scale" than a classroom. Scale in education is nebulous though... "same but different".

Not nothing—but the primary voucher funding threat comes from not by driving kids out of public schools, but by states setting up entirely new subsidy systems for kids never enrolled in the first place.

The thing I've never understood, even after unpacking this belief bit by bit with different folks, is why they've come to believe that people should "learn" this way. I ask them who were their best teachers and what did those teachers do and none of them have anything to do with scripts.

Why should any classroom teacher care about "what works at scale"? The job is to reach and teach the real kids in front of them right now, not hypothetical ones in an entirely separate context.

Dale's comment stuck in my craw for the last week, so of course I wrote about it. The sheet music isn’t the song, the script isn’t the film, and the checklist isn’t the surgery. What the Script Can't Write: covingtonedu.substack.com/p/what-the-s...

Exactly. What’s so hard to understand about “No, not like that”?

It was a newsworthy scandal when Dutch right-wing politician Geert Wilders shared posts from this account in 2024:

Rob & Tom of the FRAMES Project (Far-Right Radicalisation in Alternative Media Sources) have completed similar coalition analysis of the PragerU pipeline in the US here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

For me, it's the hubris. And as someone who has followed his work off and on over the years, it's gotten a lot worse recently. "We know" "All kids" I mean, c'mon.

What bothers me most about this is the idea that it’s either rigidly implemented scripts or totally unstructured instructional improv. We can’t have a serious discourse about anything like this.

Things apolitical people say on X:

I'll add that the previews were all for movies you'd have to Clockwork Orange me to sit through, and there was an ad for Fanta that my 11yo immediately clocked as AI.

Oh and I voted today. ✅

Just got out of Wildwood with zero expectations going in. Best I can describe it is if Jim Henson's Labyrinth took place inside Princess Mononoke as a modern day Grimm's Fairy Tales. It's dark and takes the violence of its world with deadly seriousness. It's an absolute masterpiece. 10/10.

"The lesson I learned as a first-time candidate is that holding school board and budget votes at the school itself is a bit like choosing between Christians and lions at the Coliseum. It has the appearance of a free and fair election, but the outcome isn’t really in doubt."

Presented without comment:

A reminder of who the OP believes should be tasked with crafting a neutral, apolitical, and non-contentious social studies curriculum in Oklahoma, for example: Ryan Walters Dennis Prager Robert Pondiscio David Barton Kevin Roberts Steve Deace

In the push for scripted curriculum, who’s in the room matters, and you’re probably not invited. covingtonedu.substack.com/p/controllin...

Curriculum does not exist in the abstract, so why are we talking about it this way? Why not just provide examples of apolitical, neutral, and non-contentious public curriculum? Who writes it, who publishes it, who delivers it, and how? Just name it!

The grand conspiracy is that translating from research into policy and practice is neither neutral nor objective. It requires building coalitions, and understanding the affinities between people and groups in those coalitions requires context. Describing a thing is also not "guilt by association."

What’s even more telling is scrolling through X and seeing who is making these claims. -EduConsultant -EduAdvocate -Edupreneur -EduCEO -EduThink tank shill -Chronically online Eduposter Literally every single one stands to profit by shifting funding from public education to private grifts.

There's been a wildly successful PR move framing educators as political insiders motivated by selfish interest in need of objective outsider-experts, including think tanks and curriculum companies, to reign them in.

If Robert Pondiscio thought education was apolitical he wouldn't split his work between two think tanks.

BREAKING: Guy who works at two different conservative think tanks says education is apolitical.