Nick Covington

Nick Covington

@covingtonedu.bsky.social

1284

Posts

Dad. 10 years teaching high school social studies.
Creative Director @ Human Restoration Project🛸#restorehumanity

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For civic education & engagement to thrive, we need fewer gatekept AP courses and MORE of exactly what states like Texas have banned: actual student participation in democratic practice, accessible to all kids, and accounted for by no AP score! www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023...

I think he totally misses the point of civic engagement and frames it incorrectly through voting as a kind of technical skill. It sounds like he might even be (again incorrectly) blaming schools for our electoral woes!

Texas guts ‘woke civics’. Now kids can't engage in a key democratic processwww.theguardian.com Many states have restricted how schools can teach race and gender, but only Texas has banned student interaction with elected officials

We've got to offer meaningful, substantial humanities education to all kids, not just to the minority of students taking AP courses or the even smaller number receiving credit tied to a 3.5 hour test in May. The College Board is not a solution to the systemic devaluation of these subjects.

What do you make of the last sentence here? www.educationnext.org/grade-inflat...

Grade Inflation Sends AP Test Scores Soaringwww.educationnext.org College Board appears to be bowing to pressure to reduce failure rates

The weather has been so severe this summer that there have been several days where it feels like dusk at 5pm. Mentally, I'm ready for bed.

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The goal of the current assault on public education as the practice of democratic citizenship is to have young people, who hold the most progressive politics of any living generation, come to find the antidemocratic reactionary political project acceptable & inevitable.

Great news: the entire transmission needs to be replaced in the used minivan we bought at the height of post-pandemic car prices because my wife's car got totaled in a hail storm. I love the 2020s, man.

Schooling for a democratic citizenship is substantially different in its ends and means than schooling-as-technical-education, and it's no accident that those pushing hardest for the latter overlap significantly with those diminishing the need for the former.

"Back to basics" has popularly meant different things at different times, but it's always been a dogwhistle for groups interested in recreating public education in the image of Christian nationalist hierarchies. From @jenniferberkshire.bsky.social & @jackschneider.bsky.social's The Education Wars:

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Super interesting finding: Depressed kids who bullied others were more likely to be suicidal than depressed kids who were bullied. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"Do we want to prepare children for such a life? No. On the contrary. We need to tell children that rat races are not good for people. We want school to be not a replica of, but an alternative to, raw reality. Such a school needs teachers with sophisticated sensitivity & effortless empathy."

The means and ends of change are inextricably linked.

Arendt: "The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world--but the most probable change is to a more violent world."

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Arendt: "The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world--but the most probable change is to a more violent world."

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If you actually care about kids and their well-being, be sure you don’t miss this, which is straight up GAO data: www.k12dive.com/news/school-...

Student arrest rates more than double when police are on-sitewww.k12dive.com Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Black and American Indian/Alaska native students were arrested at two to three times the rate of White peers, GAO finds.

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Dipping back into Twitter to lurk on assassination stuff and truly, from the bottom of my heart, unless you have massively curated lists, no one in media or politics should be microwaving their neurons on there.

We'll see how long this lasts.

I am at finger-hovering-over-the-button stage of deleting my Twitter account. Maybe I'll sleep on it...

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Around a decade ago, two assumptions arose within a dominant group: 1. Regulate information input rates into brains, and, 2. Regulate retrieval of that information in brains. From these two arose another: 3. Regulate teachers to regulate inputs & retrieval. Time to move on. #UKEd #EduSky

I am at finger-hovering-over-the-button stage of deleting my Twitter account. Maybe I'll sleep on it...

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This is an important observation: a lot of the clinical psychology Haidt et al. rely on for their asinine nonsense is based on studies like this, which are all confounding variables and no theory, with the gaps filled in by assumption. Most don't replicate, many are exaggerated. It's a huge issue.

I'm sorry but this anecdote from Jon Haidt's book about how kids don't listen to music together anymore sounds fake as shit.

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Our needs are human needs, not special needs. stimpunks.org/glossary/hum...

Human Needsstimpunks.org A human need, is “an innate and in-built requirement for each human to thrive in our current stage of evolution.”

You know it's not good when the guy at the auto shop talks to you in a tone usually reserved for telling someone their husband died in the war.

Taylor does a great job of situating phones & social media w/in the framework of past moral panics abt kids & girls in particular, but I especially love her criticism of adults not doing much else to provide safe accessible places for kids to exist outside in the "real world".

NEW EPISODE! This week, @taylorlorenz.bsky.social fights our latest moral panic. Are phones really making kids anxious, or are kids just good at noticing what’s going on?

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We have a few related pieces: Everyone Needs a Properly Equipped Toolbelt to Get Through Life stimpunks.org/2024/06/13/e... School-Induced Anxiety stimpunks.org/glossary/sch... Education Access: We’ve Turned Classrooms Into a Hell for Neurodivergence stimpunks.org/access/educa...

NEW EPISODE! This week, @taylorlorenz.bsky.social fights our latest moral panic. Are phones really making kids anxious, or are kids just good at noticing what’s going on?

Everyone Needs a Properly Equipped Toolbelt to Get Through Lifestimpunks.org Phones and tablets and especially laptops are essential tools for navigating modernity. Instead of being banned, they should be baked into the learning experience using toolbelt theory, workflow think...

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We need the higher ed media to better describe what's at stake here. These are not "reforms," they're an authoritarian takeover. They're not "bold" or "sweeping," they're undemocratic and fascist. These aren't normal policy recommendations, they're a dismantling of higher education!

How Project 2025 could radically reshape higher edwww.insidehighered.com The sweeping conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration would dismantle the Education Department, privatize student loans and end all ongoing Title IX investigations. Critics say it’s a ...

Finally sat down and watched The Duellists last night. Casting Keith Carradine & Harvey Keitel as French military officers (surrounded by British accents) is somehow absolutely perfect and totally nuts.

At a meeting today for my disabled 6yo, summer day care manager noted it is a "safety issue" for my kid to need 1:1 attention for longer than 10 minutes because it leaves the 1 other staff w/ the remaining kids. That's a resource/staffing issue, not a safety issue induced by my child.

Has anyone in the United States ever had a *good* childcare experience, particularly for ND kids? Mine are 6 and 9 now, and it feels like the situation has always been, Pick One: Affordable, Accessible, OR Quality, even when we were paying like $19k/year for both of them in daycare. Absolutely dire.

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how is this a figure

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There is a lot of research on this. Learning about racism doesn't make white kids feel guilty. Here is what it does. Summary of some of the studies here: fivethirtyeight.com/features/wha...

Without even clicking the link, I’ll guess the reason — all the talk of racism makes white kids feel guilty. Again, if your kids are reading histories of slavery or segregation and identifying with the racists in the story, that suggests you’ve got your own problems to work through. Leave us out.

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I'm sorry but this anecdote from Jon Haidt's book about how kids don't listen to music together anymore sounds fake as shit.

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The many manifestations of racism — slavery, segregation, etc — were an integral part of not just African American history, but American history. Denying that reality and pretending racism wasn’t a serious problem is, in itself, racist.

Harford County (a right wing exurban county home to John Wilkes Booth) school board votes 5-4 to not allow AP African American Studies classes because they focus too much on racism

African American studies is too ‘divisive’ for one Maryland school districtwww.thebaltimorebanner.com The move left students and staff scrambling to find replacement classes, but some educators and diversity advocates say the broader message does more lasting damage.