Special Education Today newsletter 5(8)
What might want to know about SET for the previous week?
Good day or evening to you, dear Dear Readers! Here’s this week’s newsletter for Special Education Today. It is, indeed, the eighth issue of the fifth volume, not the sixth volume as I mistakenly wrote in the headline for last week’s issue. Sigh. This issue covers the week that began 18 August 2025 (with that mistakenly titled headline).
Thank you all for being Dear Readers with extra doses of thanks for those who have paid subscriptions and whipped cream and a cherry on top for those who make additional contributions via their patron-level subscriptions. You all know what to expect from this newsletter, so let’s get to the usual contents (a photo, some updates, a catalog of recent contents, and a commentary).
Photo
So I got a new phone this past week. Here’s its first glam shot (taken using my tablet, so it’s not a “selfie”).
My previous phone was four years and about eight months old. It had two problems: (a) the phone speaker didn’t work unless I used used “speaker phone,” and (b) the battery was so degraded that it did not charge past 70-some% capacity. It was four years and about eight months old.
I shall return to the topic of smart phones later in this newsletter. This image may therefore be justifiably taken as a teaser.
Update on SET
The biggest event of the week for SET central is not the new phone. It is that SET has been disconnected from the Intertubes for days! Our internet service provider stopped our service. It wasn’t stopped because of something bad we did. We didn’t get dinged for using the service fraudulently or inappropriately. The company’s processes simply dictated that when I opened a new account, the former account would be deactivated. The company followed that policy despite the fact that it had not made the new account active. It’s support system (which has poorly programmed voice mail and AI chat systems) was little help; even when I got a human (6 of them, in fact, over the course of hours on my old telephone), that was no help (“Sorry that department is closed for the weekend; there’s no one there who can help you”). Sigh. So, we’ve been living without ISP service for about 60 hours as of Sunday late afternoon.1
Thanks to everyone who has renewed her subscription lately. Renewals happen essentially automatically, but sometimes things go awry and the fintech company (Stripe.com) that handles SET payments will communicate with readers. Usually it is something like a change in a credit card (new CVC, expiration date, or card number). There’s no need to be alarmed if you get such a notice. Just work with Stripe to fix things.2 Let me know directly if you have trouble, as I can possibly do something. from my end.
Thank you, too, for dropping “likes” on posts. The like-rate seems to be up recently (“seems” is on a subjective scale; I haven’t counted how many there were in the last week or two, let alone gone back to count for a baseline rate). It the frequency of Ike’s is higher recently, that’s wonderful.
SET is still hovering at just fewer than 990 subscribers. In addition to those registered subscribers, there are others who “follow” SET. They get notices when I post them on the social-media version of Substack, I’m not as careful about alerting readers using that mechanism as I am alerting you, Dear Readers, i.e., subscribers, about the latest (and greatest?) from SET via e-mail. I’m also not posting to X or Facebook, so we haven’t been attracting readers from those sources.
Extra-special shout out to Dan H. and Jane B. for dropping comments this week. We dang near got a couple of conversations going. Comments are a way for subscribers to amplify, elaborate on, or disagree with the posts. In my hopes for SET, subscribers will comment on each other’s comments…like, having a discussion, you know?
Did I mention that SET is now an official corporation? I registered “Special Education Today LLC” with the Virginia State Corporation Commission during the beginning of August. So, we’re legal, and SET can continue as an entity on its own.
Table of last week’s posts
Last week I used “spedlets” on Joel M.’s suggestion. Back to my old tricks here, but what do you recommend? Any way, here are links to the posts published during the week beginning 18 August 2025. Given the ISP problems, it has fewer entries than usual. (All are by JWL.)
Special Education Today newsletter 5(7):3 What happened during the week that began 11 August 2025?
Shunting aside kids with EBD once again: Why would we tolerate disrespecting some kids with disabilities?
Remembering Ted Carr: Who was the researcher whose work helped establish practices in autism and developmental disabilities that are still used routinely today?
Digital devices are horrible! Awful!: Well, isn't that the truth? Ain't that so? Doesn't everybody know it?
Friday photos with John M. 1998: Who was John Mesinger?
Now, some of you Dear Readers may consider this a pretty thin week, and I certainly don’t blame you. I get it. There were, as mentioned earlier, other factors that took up lots of cycles for this old editor. Those cycles didn’t go to researching and writing content. Sigh.
Just in case SET publishes something fantastic in the coming days and weeks, you should subscribe. You never know! Iota could happen. If you have a subscription, you’ll get it right away. At the very least you’ll get some recent news and info—goddesses and the Intertubes willing.
Commentary
When I was working on the post about the evil scourge that is cellphones, I thought about one of the topics that distracts me regularly. I was struck again4 by how sloppily we often reason in debates about education.
So much of the content that I found when I examined published material about the deleterious effects of smart- or cellphones was predicated on impressions, images, and feelings. People were writing about their subjective interpretations of the consequences of kids having cellphones, perhaps predicated on their informal observations of youth with phones in public places, perhaps rooted in images they had seen on television news or fictional shows, perhaps informed by stories they had heard about incidents in schools, perhaps based on some other written stories.
When authors of the articles about the scourge of cellphones actually referred to verifiable evidence (i.e., research), it was routinely descriptive or correlational (or both). Essentially, they often assert a causal relationship from those evil phone thingies and some undesirable behavior. They depended more on facts that might be verifiable, but did not indicate a causal relationship. This was true not just for the articles by typical writers for the popular press, but even my esteemed colleagues such as Jon Haidt.
Peopole might argue that there is a “crisis” because of descriptions about students “acting up.” They might argue that there are more events that make students subject to discipline than there used to be and that that’s because more cell phones in use than there used to be…and that the two have both increased over the years. Uhm the two descriptions are correlated. They might argue that increases in students use of technology has increased over the same years that students’ scores on major measures of achievement have declined. Uhm the two measures are correlated.
In my book, it’s pretty had to argue causal relationships using correlational or descriptive data.5 Accomplished scholars like Jon often acknowledge this issue and address it, as he did here in an article for After Babble (his Substack)
You might be thinking that these are correlational findings; maybe the smarter students are just better able to resist temptation? Perhaps, but experiments using random assignment likewise show that using or just seeing a phone or receiving an alert causes students to underperform.
Thinking carefully about those results to which Jon refers is instructive. They describe factual relationships between variables. Yay! Do they show that smart phones are causing under achievement? Well, not really. They show that seeing a phone causes underperformance on some measure. We humans must take the facts and interpret them to get to that original question. Jon Haidt is careful and open about the interpretations he makes.
Not everyone is careful. I invite Dear Readers to listen to the arguments folks might mount in conversations around the teachers’ lounge, chit-chat during a cocktail reception, or discussions on talk-shows and podcasts. There are lots of interpretations getting passed around as indicative of causes, yet they are often essentially descriptions or correlations. And the issue isn’t just smart phones. Schools where students must wear uniforms have higher achieving students. Or, try this one: Kids who spend more time in inclusive settings have better outcomes.
I’m routinely concerned that we get the facts and state them plainly rather than depending on spin and interpretation. As a help for readers understanding what I mean…this entire column is spin.
So, let me leave us with the usual recommendations, and please note that I’m not asserting a causal relationship between adherence to these recommendations and better outcomes for students with disabilities. For your own sake, and because it might be good for our kids, please take care of yourselves and each other. If we do take care of ourselves and our colleagues and neighbors, I hope that it will allow us to teach our children well.
Stay happy, please,
JohnL
John Wills Lloyd, Ph.D., UVA Professor Emeritus,
Founder & Editor, Special Education Today
SET should not be confused with a product that uses the same name and is published by the Council for Exceptional Children. SET predated CEC’s publication by decades. Despite my appreciation for CEC, this product is not designed to promote that organization nor should the views expressed here be considered to represent the views or policies of that organization.
Footnotes
Yes, I can make a cellular connection. Such connections are not sufficient for relation Ely intensive research and file transfers, at least in my cushy experience. To publish this newsletter, I went to our daughter’s house and use her wi-fi.
Note, however, that Stripe has robust fraud prevention features. If someone reports that his card has been lost, stolen, or misused, Stripe will not allow charges to it. Extra note: If you see a charge from Stripe for SET on your credit card, please do not report it was fraudulent; just go to Substack (or Stipe) and unsubscribe. When someone reports an SET charge as fraudulent, I get stuck with hours of work (grief) and dollars (and dollars) of penalty charges.
My error in number for the volume is corrected here. Sigh.
Ouch!
Yes, I know about cross-lagged panel analysis and its cousins (e.g., the sophisticated path analysis). One can make a pretty strong argument for causal relationships from path data, but the case still is not definitive.