The Lab Bench: Science Education Unfiltered

Send us Fan Mail If the evidence against ed tech is this damning, why hasn’t the industry backed off? In Part 2, Alyse follows the money, and the lawsuits, to find out. She breaks down the business model behind “personalized learning,” two real, finalized legal cases involving the FTC and Chicago Public Schools, and the spring 2026 Canvas data breach that touched schools nationwide. She names the four-move “rebrand playbook” the industry uses every time pushback builds, and exposes how pay-to...

Send us Fan Mail We were told technology would personalize learning. Instead, it made learning more impersonal than it's ever been. In Part 1 of this two-part episode, Alyse digs into what a decade of one-to-one devices, personalized learning platforms, and AI tutors has actually cost students, cognitively. Drawing on neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath's The Digital Delusion and the newly released PISA 2025 results, she walks through the data on effect sizes, attention, empathy, and skill tr...

Send us Fan Mail Six weeks into the school year, lab days are officially part of the routine. But are your students investigating, or just following directions? In this episode of The Lab Bench, Alyse breaks down what a real NGSS and STEELS-aligned inquiry lab actually looks like, why so many "cookbook" labs are actually confirmation exercises, and how the gradual release model, moving from structured to guided to open inquiry, builds strong scientific thinking without turning your classroom ...

Send us Fan Mail Part two of the science crisis conversation picks up where last week left off. Alyse makes the case that NCLB and ESSA weren't malicious, they were underfunded, and that gap between policy intent and policy follow-through set the stage for everything that came after. Then the tech surge arrived and compounded the problem. TIMSS data shows the same pattern across four different subject and grade combinations: the more in-school computer use goes up, the more scores go down, an...

Send us Fan Mail The science crisis isn't a pandemic story. It's a pedagogy story, and it started decades before 2020. This episode lays out the data on where student science performance and interest actually stand, then traces the root cause back further than most people look: the shift from teaching students to think like scientists to teaching them to perform on a test. Alyse argues that No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act gradually changed what we ask of students, and ...