Walk into any district office, and you’ll find a wall of initiatives: a new attendance campaign, a behavior matrix, a technology rollout, an engagement task force. Each one has a coordinator, a budget line, and a PD day. Each one is treating a real problem. And most of them are aimed at the exhaust, not the engine.
Here’s the uncomfortable question nobody wants to ask in the initiative-planning meeting: what if disengagement, behavior referrals, chronic absenteeism, and flat technology adoption aren’t four separate problems? What if they’re the same problem, showing up in four different places — and that problem is what’s actually happening in the classroom every single day?
That’s Tier 1. Not intervention. Not the extra layer we add when something goes wrong. The core instruction every student gets, all day, every day.
Think about it from the student’s seat. If the daily instructional experience is passive, low-choice, and disconnected from anything that feels real, disengagement isn’t a mystery — it’s the rational response. And disengagement doesn’t stay quiet. Sometimes it looks like a referral, because escaping a task you can’t access or don’t care about is easier than sitting in it. Sometimes it looks like an absence, because why show up for a place that reliably makes you feel incapable or invisible? And sometimes it looks like a shiny new app nobody actually uses the way it was designed, because we handed teachers a tool without ever fixing the pedagogy underneath it — you can’t digitize your way out of a worksheet.
None of this means Tier 1 is the only cause. Poverty, trauma, staffing shortages, systemic inequities — all of that is real, and none of it fits neatly into a blog post. But Tier 1 is the cause we can actually do something about tomorrow morning, and it’s the one we consistently overlook, because it’s less visible than a new initiative and slower to show results than a new program.
And that’s the real trap: when we keep stacking initiatives without asking how each one strengthens Tier 1, we don’t just fail to fix the root problem — we make it worse. Every new program pulls something from the instructional core to attend a meeting, complete a checklist, or sit through training. We end up with less bandwidth for the one lever that actually moves all four problems at once, in the name of fixing all four problems separately.
So before the next initiative gets adopted, it’s worth asking one question: does this make Tier 1 instruction stronger, or does it just add another layer on top of a core we never fixed?
Meanwhile, some time later that very self-same second…
Besides the usual “10 Things,” I’m throwing in some bonus shares each week. Just for funsies. Like this:
A Musical Interlude: Vasily Kalinnikov’s Symphony No. 1 in G minor (I played the finale in high school band, so there’s a special place in my heart for this one.)
And now… you’re regularly scheduled 10 Things…
10 Things — September 17, 2026
It’s the screens, stupid!
Alexander Thompson takes apart James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages, a bleak new book arguing that screens are pushing us into a “post-literate” society. Thompson agrees with some of it but pulls apart the PISA-and-IQ-decline evidence piece by piece, landing on a more honest “it’s complicated” than the book allows.
Why Are Our Kids Not Reading?
Reacting to this year’s PISA reading drop, Kip Glazer resists the doom narrative and points instead to the widening gap between the highest- and lowest-achieving students — arguing that relationships with teachers and family, not screen time alone, are what actually move the needle.
#882: Why Kids Can Learn 10x Faster Than We Think
Tim Ferriss hosts a live, unscripted coaching session with Niels Hoven, founder of Mentava, a startup built to serve fast learners underserved by a system paced for the average student. Worth the listen if you’re thinking about differentiation and acceleration.
Evaluation or AI-valuation
Heléna Stakounis lays out the real bind AI creates for assessment: detectors don’t work, oral exams don’t scale, and reverting to timed, invigilated exams undoes decades of progress on teaching students to draft, revise, and think on paper. No tidy answer — just an honest look at the tradeoffs.
AI has made the practice of homework obsolete
Clark Aldrich’s provocation: schools can’t realistically keep AI out of students’ hands for long, so the critical-thinking skills schools actually care about have to get built during the school day itself, not assigned as take-home work.
The Importance of Reading (and Teaching) Cyberpunk in the Age of AI
Joanna Nelius-Free, a former tech journalist turned high school teacher, uses cyberpunk fiction — including E.M. Forster’s 1909 story “The Machine Stops” — to help students name what unsettles them about living inside AI-mediated systems. A warm, personal essay about teaching literature that talks back to the present.
AI Framework for Educator Preparation
A tight, 7-page framework for preparing teachers to work with AI, built around four pillars: ethical (including the right to refuse), practice, cognitive, and expertise. One of the better summaries of where the field’s thinking has landed this year.
OPINION: We’ve been treating college as a career plan, but it’s failing too many students
Pat O’Donnell on the wave of kids — even from wealthy families — opting for trade certifications over four-year degrees, and why treating college as a guaranteed career plan set up a whole generation for disappointment.
Libraries Are Not the Problem
Ron Charles on the awkward same-morning collision of a PEN America report on libraries under siege and a publishing-industry study blaming ebook lending for hurting book sales. A clear-eyed, slightly wry look at who’s actually squeezing whom.
Am I well-read if I haven’t read the right books?
Lou Blaser’s honest, funny essay about feeling insecure over reading thrillers and police procedurals instead of “serious” literary fiction — and pushing back on the idea that some reading is a guilty-pleasure “off-season.” Sometimes, you just need permission to enjoy a book for nothing more than enjoyment’s sake.
That’s a wrap, gang. Have fun out there.
