Every sitcom that survives to episode 50 eventually does the clip show. The cast sits around a table remembering things that have happened, and the studio saves a fortune on sets.
This is ours. Except all of it actually happened, we have the archives to prove it and every one of our “clips” makes an actual difference in the lives of educators and their students.
We’ve released 50 issues of On the Subject, which adds up to 50 conversations with people who teach, lead, coach and occasionally eat lunch standing over a filing cabinet. We've covered teacher hiring, arts budgets on the chopping block, EdTech nobody asked for, straight-A kids falling apart where no one can see it and paperwork that eats a Thursday alive.
Just as you don’t have a favorite student (sure, Jan), we don’t have favorite issues… But the topics covered here are a few that we want to make sure you didn’t miss.
If you subscribed recently, most of this will be brand new to you. So, welcome! We’re happy to have you. For the longstanding subscribers, thanks for joining the ride. We’re in this together, and we’re just getting started.
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Here’s what’s on the dashboard this week:
Today’s Deep Dive: Celebrating 50 with a few of our greatest hits
Reading Rainbow: PISA tanks, Microsoft signs, NYC ban
From Our Desk: We say yee, you say haw
Recent Favorite Conversations + Resources
We went back through 50 issues and pulled the five we'd hand a new subscriber first. They start wide with hiring and money, then narrow down to the kid in the third row who never raises their hand.
Bonus: Each and every one has something for the classroom and something for the district office.
Jason Miller spent 20 years as general counsel before teaching kindergarten in Honolulu. He writes classroom rules the way he wrote contracts, which is how you end up with eight separate rules just for going down the slide. One student, told not to make a certain hand gesture (you know the one), showed up the next day with a carefully drawn version instead. Loophole closed.
For teachers: You've probably worked next to a career-switcher and wondered why they're the calmest person in the building during a fire drill. Here’s what we can all learn from them.
For administrators: With 400,000-plus positions open or filled by someone not fully certified, this is a hiring pool most job postings screen out by accident.
Arts is the first line item to go when money gets tight, which Lindsey Sherrard has watched happen across a decade of teaching visual arts K-12. Her math: 3.2% of the US education budget goes to the arts, while the entertainment industry those skills feed runs north of $2 trillion.
For teachers: The biology-meets-illustration lesson she built with a science teacher is the kind of thing you can borrow by Tuesday.
For administrators: Send this around before your next budget meeting. It puts arts funding in terms a school board actually responds to.
Tim Clary sells EdTech for a living and used this piece to call his own industry lazy. Teachers aren't scared of software. They're working nearly ten more hours a week than comparable professionals for roughly $30,000 less, and every new platform costs energy nobody has left.
For teachers: Validation, in writing, from someone with a quota to meet.
For administrators: A checklist of what to ask a vendor before signing, dressed up as a story. You're the one holding the pen.
Another great one from Tim Clary… His college coach threatened to cut him over his grades, then raised the support instead of dropping the standard. That became four questions for spotting the student who's sinking without telling anyone: What's their story outside the sport? Can they ask for help without losing status? What am I teaching beyond technique? How do I react when they fail?
For teachers: Works on the quiet kid in third period just as well as the quarterback.
For administrators: Those four questions also apply to the staff member who never says no to anything.
A charter school principal built a 100% college-going rate on a single requirement with no opt-out. Every student performs in a music group. She also wants teachers doing less non-teaching work, which is a bold thing to say out loud from her chair.
For teachers: The one-non-negotiable idea shrinks down to fit a single classroom. A shared ritual, a semester project or anything nobody gets to skip.
For administrators: She puts real numbers on how much of a teacher's week disappears into compliance, and she isn't subtle about wanting that number lower.
Everyone failed the test together: The 2025 PISA round produced the worst average math and reading scores ever recorded worldwide, with US 15-year-olds dropping 14 points in reading since 2022. Over half of students surveyed said they lean on chatbots for schoolwork at least a few times a month. We trained the robot on our homework, then had the robot do our homework and now everybody is worse at homework. Somewhere a snake is eating its own tail while filling out a Scantron.
Pinky promise, but legally binding: Teachers unions AFT and UFT got Microsoft to sign an enforceable standard that bars the company from training AI models on student and teacher data or selling it to advertisers, available to every district starting Nov. 1. AFT President Randi Weingarten says OpenAI and Anthropic are next on her list. Somewhere a data broker is weeping into a spreadsheet of third-grade reading scores he can no longer sell to a mattress company.
The 1930s called, and they fixed your reading scores: Greater Holy Temple Christian Academy in Milwaukee switched to structured literacy and watched first graders meeting foundational reading proficiency climb from 27% to 79% in a single year. Kindergarten letter-sound accuracy went from 25% to 87%. The model is Orton-Gillingham, built in the 1930s, which means the answer to the reading crisis has been sitting in the national attic next to a rotary phone and a jar of pennies nobody wanted to count.
Three hours of screens and the wheels come off: OECD researchers found classroom tech helps student outcomes right up until kids pass roughly three hours a day on devices, at which point performance starts sliding across every country measured. The sharper finding is that American device time shifted away from making things and toward scrolling Instagram and TikTok. We handed every child a supercomputer and they used it to watch a grown man rank gas station snacks, which, in fairness, is also what we did with ours.
Guess who is holding the rulebook: New York City's new policy blocks student-facing AI from 2-K through eighth grade and caps screen time by grade level, and the enforcement plan largely comes down to trusting teachers and principals to sort it out. The person already covering somebody else's lunch duty is now the city's frontline AI compliance officer, a role that pays zero additional dollars and comes with a lanyard nobody ordered.
Two-year-olds report for duty: New York City opened its first 2,000 free 2-K seats this month, most of them running 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. for 260 days a year, after roughly 5,700 families applied. There is now a competitive waitlist for kids too young to know the word “waitlist,” and one of them is going to run this city someday on a platform of significantly more snacks.
Our CEO on the metric we SHOULD be tracking in classrooms (but aren’t).
Subject powers TPH Academy, which allows student-athletes the chance to continue their education while also prioritizing their sport. Last week, we popped up at the USHL Fall Classic at Chicago’s new Blackhawks Ice Center, and we left feeling inspired as ever.
Who’s heading to the Texas Leaders Round Up Event this Thursday and Friday? Email [email protected] if you want to get together onsite.
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