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I thought readers might, or might not, find this new regular post useful.

Each week, I highlight several sentences, with links to their sources, that I find interesting/concerning/useful.  And they may, or may not, be directly connected to education.  I may also include my own comments or related links.

This regular post will join my other regular ones on teaching ELLs, education policy, Artificial Intelligence, infographics, and Pinterest highlights, not to mention sharing of my regular Education Week posts.

Here are this week’s sentences:

When you got in trouble at Success or you’re trying to talk to a teacher to change a grade or why you were late to class, it’s never a conversation. It’s a monologue.

As a businessperson-turned-teacher, I can’t emphasize enough that to talk of a “learning recession” in public schools is to beckon to the ideology of the free market and business methods that cannot be sensibly applied to K-12 schooling. See The Best Posts & Articles Explaining Why Schools Should Not Be Run Like Businesses

Akwesasne Mohawk children, were being confined by special education teachers in wooden boxes.

Students Haven’t Lost Focus. They’ve Lost the Reason to Care.

The problem is not that motivation leads to achievement or that achievement leads to motivation. The research literature increasingly suggests that both processes influence each other continuously.

The Trump administration, however, has shown nothing but contempt for the patient work of building durable power based on consensus, preferring the blitzkrieg of violence.

Its choice to close the Office of English Language Acquisition is best understood, then, as another textbook case of the administration vowing to address a problem by trying less hard to solve it. 

A widely discussed working paper put out by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in 2024 warned of a worst-case scenario in which an abrupt fifteen-per-cent enrollment drop could lead to the closures of up to eighty colleges and universities, with the most pain being felt at small, regional private schools.

Taking a broad view, it’s possible to argue that Britain won the American Revolutionary War.

Immigration enforcement actions can lead to sustained increases in absenteeism among immigrant students, according to a new working paper from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.

“Talent is not enough,” he said. “You need to put in the work, too.

‘Watch the ball as it hits your paddle’ is the best pickleball advice I’ve ever gotten and it can be applied to so many other aspects of life

— Larry Ferlazzo (@larryferlazzo.bsky.social) May 16, 2026 at 9:46 AM

Khanmigo is “is about as close to a best-case scenario for A.I. in education” is not the endorsement the author thinks it is ——OpenAI and Khan Academy Made a Chatbot. What Can We Learn? www.nytimes.com/2026/05/16/b… gift link

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— Larry Ferlazzo (@larryferlazzo.bsky.social) May 16, 2026 at 5:11 AM

The reason people keep doing crimes for Trump is that you get rewarded for doing them, congratulations to Colorado’s Dem governor for making sure we get more people trying to overturn elections on his behalf bsky.app/profile/kyle…

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— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) May 15, 2026 at 1:56 PM

“I’m just so goddamn fed up with all this,” Gina Small, 29, said in a comment on the U.S. economy that one of her friends assumed was about the world’s ongoing humanitarian crises, another friend thought was about the weaponization of America’s military against its own people.

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— The Onion (@theonion.com) May 15, 2026 at 5:00 PM

One year, after reading in a textbook that feudalism was over, my class of farm workers’ children wrote the authors disputing their assertion. They never received a response———We Are Sliding Back Into the Middle Ages www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/o…

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— Larry Ferlazzo (@larryferlazzo.bsky.social) May 18, 2026 at 8:02 AM

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— Larry Ferlazzo (@larryferlazzo.bsky.social) May 19, 2026 at 9:08 AM