In 1899, William James offered teachers a warning about his own field. "Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves," he wrote in Talks to Teachers on Psychology. Someone still had to make the application, using observation, originality, and judgment. There was a person between the research and the child.

More than a century later, 57 students in Fort Worth have something to say about that person's working conditions. In a letter criticizing changes under the district's state-appointed leadership, students describe scripted lessons, errors in required slideshows, and teachers visibly strained by classroom inspections. Chron's Macy Meinhardt reports that the instructional model is used at 19 schools. The district says student feedback has already led to changes. Among the students' requests: let them engage with what they're learning, and pay attention to what the pressure is doing to their teachers.

The letter brings a student perspective to a question Larry Ferlazzo's contributors take up in Education Week today: how do the science and art of teaching work together? Teacher educators Margo Gottlieb and Gisela Ernst-Slavit describe teaching as an art that science keeps informing and refining. Research supplies the theory, evidence, and tested strategies. The teacher adapts and interprets them for the students in the room, starting from what each one brings.

That skill is built in practice, not in a workshop. K-12 Dive's Ed Finkel reports on Elaine Allensworth's studies of Chicago Public Schools, where the professional learning that produced gains for struggling students was school-based, collaborative, and gave teachers time to try new methods, see what worked, and get feedback. Online-only PD reached more people and helped less. Implementing a curriculum with fidelity, Allensworth says, doesn't mean everyone doing it the same way: "There's teacher discretion there."

A new report from my colleagues Evo Popoff, Daimen Sagastume, and Matt Tower makes that attention to individual students concrete. The State of Tutoring 2026, commissioned by Pearl, examines nearly 884,000 tutoring sessions delivered to more than 64,000 students across 28 programs. Among programs whose averages met the 90-minute weekly tutoring benchmark, 29% of students were receiving less than that. The sample isn't nationally representative, and the report measures delivery rather than learning outcomes. But it shows how a reassuring program average can conceal a child receiving less support than intended.

One example in the report comes from Metro Nashville, where schools choose tutoring arrangements suited to their students while the district checks plans against research-based expectations. Session data helps the team identify where implementation is struggling. School visits and conversations help explain why.

There's a similar sequence in EdSurge's reporting on rural districts recovering attendance. Ohio administrator Chris Miller describes using technology to identify absent students so staff can spend more time talking with families about the reasons. Elsewhere, those conversations lead to individualized attendance plans or bags of food sent home. Miller adds that the welcome a student gets on returning matters as much as the call. Knowing who is missing gives an adult somewhere to start.

Harvard's Rick Weissbourd has a way of making sure no student goes unnoticed. In another K-12 Dive piece today, he describes asking every teacher to name the students they have a caring relationship with, then assigning an adult to anyone nobody mentions. His standard is a teacher who "knows the name and something in particular about every kid in the class."

All that noticing, interpreting, and following up takes energy. In today's EdSurge podcast on the "October Blues," former teacher Mike Anderson recalls tracking the drills, meetings, and assemblies that interrupted his instruction. Over a year, they added up to more than 30 instructional days, about a sixth of the school year. He encourages school leaders to build autonomy, competence, purpose, and belonging into teachers' working lives. By October, the person between the research and the child could use some attention too.

— Thomas

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