🌵 Pick a lane, Texas

Today’s Deep Dive: 5 plays Texas districts are running 

Reading Rainbow: Kids, cardigans, and cursive

From Our Desk: Now you know where to find us

Watch of the Week: Suits Is a Lesson Plan in Disguise

Start with freshmen, grow with them. Build slowly with a single cohort over four years. The patience required is real, but so is the payoff.

Give seniors and juniors an exit ramp. Older students who want to work, stack dual-enrollment credits or focus on athletics are a natural audience. The lift to launch is low and the demand is easy to read.

Serve your current students first. For districts not facing major enrollment loss, the opening move is offering more flexibility to students, including those homeschooling, who are already enrolled—hybrid schedules, flexible periods, staying connected to campus.

Open the doors statewide. For districts using virtual as a real enrollment driver, outside-district students are the target.

Keep students on campus for the things they love. Some students genuinely want to be at school—for band, Friday Night Lights, and the social fabric. Let them. 

Eight kids skipped school to save it: Every student at Alderney's only secondary school—all eight of them—staged a one-day walkout to protest a years-long teacher shortage that has left their GCSE prep in the hands of a rotating cast of supply staff. Their ask was not radical: just permanent teachers, consistently showing up, teaching the actual curriculum. The UK government is now considering sending subject specialists from Guernsey next term. 

Fred Rogers was a learning scientist (and he did it in a cardigan): Twenty-five years after his last episode aired, teachers are still studying Fred Rogers the way film students study Stanley Kubrick. A new EdWeek piece reports that educators across the country are keeping his methods alive in classrooms, because the guy genuinely understood how kids learn. Turns out building context before introducing new material, taking children's feelings seriously, and making students feel loved before trying to educate them are not soft skills. They're the whole job.

Nobody asked for this: Cursive is making a comeback in more than two dozen states, but is this actually useful or just for vibes? Researchers are split: some say there's no clear cognitive benefit beyond regular handwriting, while others argue students need to be fluent across multiple writing modes, including stylus, print and yes, the loopy stuff.

STEM was built for curious brains, but forgot some of them: If STEM programs aren't intentionally designed with neurodivergent learners in mind, then they're not actually accessible. The argument isn't that STEM is bad for students who learn differently, but that open-ended expectations, unclear success criteria and sensory-heavy materials can flip a strength into a barrier fast. Fix the design, and STEM works better for everyone. 

GSSA Spring Bootstrap Conference in Savannah, GA, April 15-16

OAASFEP 2026 Federal Programs Spring Conference in Columbus, OH, April 15-17

TexasTech and Learning (Region 4) in Houston, TX, April 17 

RTM, NSF in St. Louis, MO, April 19-21, 

WABE 2026 Annual Conference in Yakima, WA, April 23-26

K12 Collaborative, Spring Summit 2026 in Naperville, IL, April 29

MAEO Spring Conference in Traverse City, MI, April 29-May 1

CCEA Plus in Los Angeles, CA, April 30-May 3 

What makes a good helper? Use the show as a jumping-off point for discussing teamwork, fairness and why rules exist. Yeah, yeah, you're using a legal drama to teach kids about sharing, but trust us, it’ll work!

Fact vs. opinion: Who's telling the truth? Suits is wall-to-wall people making arguments with varying levels of actual evidence. It’s a perfect, slightly chaotic entry point for teaching students to distinguish a claim from a fact. Bonus: it gets very loud, which keeps everyone awake.

Research and case-building: Assign students a real historical case or current event and ask them to build a "legal brief" arguing one side. Have them even pull evidence, anticipate counterarguments and present it in front of the class. Your students can use Google. Nobody has to know.

Power, institutions and how they actually work: Harvey Specter does not succeed because the system is fair. No, he succeeds because he understands how the system actually operates and uses it better than everyone else. For upperclassmen who are about to meet that system in real life, this is a surprisingly useful case study in institutional power, class and access.

Non-traditional career paths: Mike Ross never went to law school and ended up running a firm. Use that to open a conversation about what skills actually matter in a career, what credentials do and don't tell you, and why "I didn't take the traditional path" is a sentence with a lot of successful endings.