GM. This is The Great Unlock, your weekly cheat sheet for the AI revolution. We filter out the noise, red pen fake news, and give out stickers to those deserving.

Today's deep dive: a celebrated cohort of readers went from the best in the country to among the worst in under a decade, and two smart writers reached two different verdicts on why. One blamed effort. One blamed middle school. Both walked right past the mechanism sitting underneath their feet, the one that explains the whole shape of the collapse.

It is the Jenga Effect, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

Let’s unlock it.

A tower does not fall because of the block you pull at the top. It falls because of the gaps left lower down, the ones nobody noticed while it still stood.

In 2015, a cohort of American fourth graders posted the highest average reading scores ever recorded on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. They looked like the best-prepared generation of readers the country had ever produced. Four years later, as eighth graders, they had slipped badly. By the time they graduated high school in 2023, their SAT and ACT scores were among the weakest in decades. First to worst, in a single school career.

Tim Daly went looking for the cause in the survey data those students filled out alongside their tests. He found four warning signs, all bending the wrong way in the same window: reading for fun was down, screens inside classrooms were up, homework was shrinking, and test preparation had been quietly retired. He wove them into a theory about the erosion of sustained effort.

Christopher Stewart pushed back hard. The same first-to-worst shape, he pointed out, shows up in states with wildly different policies. Mississippi posts nation-leading fourth grade reading gains and then watches them compress to almost nothing by eighth grade. Florida produces some of the best fourth grade math scores in the country alongside eighth graders ranked in the bottom ten. Record fourth graders, faltering eighth graders, again and again, regardless of the reform theory in play. His verdict: the problem is not effort. The problem is middle school itself, the structural weak point of the whole system.

Both are circling the same truth without naming it. And the name is the Jenga Effect.

1. THE MECHANISM

Picture a Jenga tower mid-game. Blocks have been pulled from all over the structure, but it is still standing. It looks fine. It looks, from across the room, exactly like a complete tower. The gaps are there, but the tower has not yet been asked to bear weight in the places where the blocks are missing.

A child’s education works the same way. The blocks are individual skills, and they stack. Phonemic awareness holds up decoding. Decoding holds up fluency. Fluency holds up comprehension. Place value holds up multi-digit arithmetic, which holds up fractions, which holds up everything that comes after. When a pacing guide marches the class forward before a given skill is secure, it pulls a block. The gap is real, but it is invisible, because this year’s work does not yet rest on the block that is missing.

That is why the 2015 fourth graders could post record scores on a foundation that was already hollowing out. The blocks were already gone. Fourth grade reading simply had not yet asked them to carry the weight that eighth grade would.

2. WHY MIDDLE SCHOOL LOOKS LIKE THE CULPRIT

Middle school is where the load increases sharply. The reading gets longer and less narrative. The math turns abstract and multi-step. Tasks require holding several ideas in working memory at once and chaining them together without a teacher narrating each step. This is precisely the moment a tower full of hidden gaps is finally asked to bear real weight.

So it falls. And because it falls in middle school, middle school gets the blame. But the load did not create the gaps. It only revealed them. The blocks went missing years earlier, one skipped skill at a time, while everyone admired a tower that was still standing.

3. THE GREAT UNLOCK THESIS

The core argument of The Great Unlock is that learning should be the constant and time the variable. The Jenga Effect is what happens when a system insists on the opposite. A pacing guide holds time constant: every student gets the same number of days on fractions whether they have mastered them or not. Learning becomes the variable that gives way. The block gets pulled because the calendar said move on.

A mastery system inverts this. A student does not advance past a foundational skill until the block is solid, because the entire structure above it depends on that block holding. This is slower in the moment and far faster over a school career, because you are not building three more floors on top of a gap and then paying for the collapse in eighth grade.

This is also where AI changes what is possible. For the first time, every student can have a patient, adaptive tutor that detects a missing block the moment it matters and repairs it before the next floor goes on top. Not to accelerate the march through the pacing guide, but to make sure no block gets pulled in the first place.

4. FOUR QUESTIONS EVERY LEADER SHOULD ASK

1. When scores drop in a grade, do we look at that grade or the ones before it? The grade where a problem surfaces is almost never the grade where it started. If every intervention targets the current grade, you are reinforcing the floor the tower landed on instead of replacing the blocks that gave way.

2. Can we name the prerequisite skills for this year’s content? If your curriculum cannot map which skills hold up which, you cannot find a missing block on purpose. You can only wait for the collapse and guess.

3. Does passing a grade mean the foundation is solid, or just that the calendar advanced? A passing grade on a hollow foundation is a tower that is still standing. It tells you nothing about whether the blocks underneath will hold the next floor.

4. Are we using new tools to march faster or to build sounder? AI applied to a pacing guide just pulls blocks more efficiently. AI applied to mastery finds and fills the gaps before the weight arrives. Same technology, opposite outcome.

The tower did not fall in middle school. It was always falling. That is just when you could finally see it.

Sources: Daly, T. (2026). “The Fall of the Class of 2023,” The Education Daly. Stewart, C. (2026).

“Tim Daly Sucks,” the revolution will be literate (citizen.substack.com/p/tim-daly-sucks). NAEP Reading and Mathematics, Grades 4 and 8, 2003–2024.

A student can pass this year while missing the blocks underneath, because this year’s work does not yet rest on them. The gap stays invisible until the load increases.

Pinned to the board this week: the anatomy of a tower with gaps in every tier. It is still standing. That is the trap. Below the tower, the three layers every student is built from, and the data showing the same first-to-worst shape repeating across states that share almost nothing else.

A tower with gaps still stands. Right up until the moment it doesn’t.

It is the most intuitive read of the data, and it points the entire remedy at the wrong floor.

It is a sharp observation, and it is half right. Middle school is genuinely where the collapse becomes visible. The same fade between fourth and eighth grade shows up across states with completely different policies, demographics, and reform theories, which tells you something structural is happening in the middle grades. That part is real.

But visible is not the same as causal. Blaming middle school for the fall is like blaming the floor for the broken vase. The floor is where the vase landed. It is not what knocked it off the shelf.

The load increases in middle school. It does not manufacture the gaps. Those were installed years earlier, one skipped block at a time, during the elementary years when the tower was still standing and nobody had reason to look. Middle school is the floor the tower lands on, not the hand that pulled the blocks.

This distinction is not academic, because it changes the entire remedy. If middle school is the cause, you redesign middle school. If middle school is only the reveal, redesigning it cannot work, because a better eighth grade experience cannot retroactively install the foundational skills that third and fourth grade left out. You do not catch a falling tower by improving the floor. You stop the fall by not pulling the blocks.

Not where it broke. Where it showed.

The best teachers have been running the Jenga diagnostic for years, with nothing but patience and professional judgment.

Every middle school teacher has met the student who cannot do this year’s material and has quietly wondered whether he is even trying. The worksheet comes back blank. The instinct, honestly, is to read it as effort. He is not applying himself. He has checked out.

The teachers who change outcomes resist that read. They run the Jenga diagnostic instead. They ask why, specifically, this student cannot factor the expression, and they trace it backward. Not a missing effort. A missing block. He never solidified integer operations two years ago, so every step that depends on them collapses, and the factoring was just the floor the collapse happened to land on.

That backward trace is the whole game. When a student stumbles, the system’s instinct is to reteach the current grade, louder and slower. The better instinct is to find the block underneath that gave way and replace it first. You do not redecorate a top floor that is sitting on a gap. You go down and rebuild.

This is exactly what a knowledge graph does that a pacing guide never could. A pacing guide is a calendar; it only knows what week it is. A knowledge graph maps which skill sits on which, so when a student stumbles you can walk down the dependencies and find the actual gap instead of guessing. It turns the backward trace that great teachers do by instinct into something the whole system can do on purpose, for every student, before the weight arrives.

So the shout-out this week goes to every teacher who has ever looked at a struggling student and a blank worksheet and refused the easy story. Who asked what was actually missing underneath, found the block three grades down, and rebuilt the foundation instead of blaming the kid standing on it.

Don’t reteach the floor they’re standing on. Rebuild the one underneath it.

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That's all the unlock for today. Tune in next week.

Stay awesome, you unlockers!

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