We head to Fort Collins, CO where a plan to shutter multiple schools and “rightsize” the school district ran into a wall of community opposition. A feel-good tale for our feel-bad times, Fort Collins’ example signals, not just resistance to school closures, but to the larger vision of school choice and competition that pits parents against one another, deepening disparities in the process. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon: https://www.pat...
Sep 30, 2024•46 min
When Courtney Gore ran for school board in a deep red Texas county, she pledged to root out indoctrination. But once she got into office, Gore could find no evidence of indoctrination happening in the local schools. She has since disavowed the far-right platform she ran on and now argues that the school culture wars are being ginned up in order to build support for private school vouchers–and a growing number of local Republicans agree with her. Education journalist Karin Chenoweth interviewed G...
Sep 05, 2024•56 min
From the end of federal COVID relief money to declining enrollment, school districts are in a world of hurt right now. But while the causes for the rising tide of red ink are complex, the recommendations from school finance experts are always the same: cut, fire and close. Our guest, school district finance whisperer David Backer, takes serious issue with these supposed solutions and wants to arm teachers and public school advocates with the tools and knowledge necessary to fight back. The finan...
Aug 15, 2024•43 min
This is a special episode of Have You Heard, and not just because co-host Jack Schneider is MIA. We’re paying tribute to Jennifer’s dad, Tom Berkshire, a tireless advocate for kids and for fixing the nation’s broken foster care system. We’re headed to a magical community in western Massachusetts called Treehouse that surrounds foster kids and their adoptive families with love while providing senior citizens with affordable housing. In other words, this is a feel good episode at a time when we co...
Jul 25, 2024•44 min
To celebrate the release of The Education Wars, we’ve gathered a cast of thousands to help bring the book to life. Our special guests help us understand what’s driving the intense push to privatize schools, what we’ll lose when public schools are gone, and how we can fight to protect and transform public education in this country. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be inspired, you’ll want to buy the book–and then give it away. Special guests include Erik Anderson, Noliwe Rooks, Derek Gottlieb, Je...
Jul 02, 2024•36 min
Students who lived through court-ordered desegregation in the South grew up to become less conservative, more tolerant adults. That’s the finding of provocative research from education scholar Mark Chin, who compared students who attended integrated schools with their peers in the same county who didn’t. Mark says his research is a reminder to academics to think bigger than test scores when looking at the impact of education policy. But it also provides us with essential context for understandin...
Jun 20, 2024•34 min
Raise your hand if you think that all of the partisan rancor over public education is bad for kids? That’s the premise of Braver Angels, a citizen’s group that aims to make America less crazy by getting people talking more and hating each other less. Co-founder Bill Doherty joins us to talk about why our debates over education are so pitched and polarized and what we can do about it. And Jack reminds us that even highly technocratic policy issues can become supercharged in an age of distrust and...
May 30, 2024•40 min
Market-based education reform may be on the wane, but what’s the alternative? Our guest, Jonathan Gyurko, author of the provocative new book Publicization, argues that public education advocates need to rally around a goal of making public schools as public as possible. That means changing the way we think about funding, governance, accountability–indeed, the very purpose of school. If we want to move beyond decades of privatization, says Gyurko, we need a hopeful vision of what schools could be...
May 16, 2024•40 min
Private school vouchers flamed out in Idaho this legislative session. So how did Idahoans succeed in saying ‘no thanks’ to a controversial and expensive policy program that is now on the books in one state after another? We’re joined by activists and advocates who say that convincing lawmakers that vouchers aren’t conservative was key. And unlike most states, Idaho has an influential business group that is staunchly anti-voucher. Add in lots of organizing and a refusal to let lawmakers enact a s...
Apr 30, 2024•43 min
From huge voucher programs that shift funding to private schools that don’t have to accept kids with disabilities to a backlash against funding, special education and the students who rely on it are newly vulnerable. In this powerful episode we hear from parents and advocates in six states about their concerns. And we’re reminded that the nation’s commitment to educating kids with special needs has always been tenuous. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscri...
Apr 09, 2024•49 min
Last year Oklahoma approved the nation’s first tax-payer funded religious charter school. It won’t be the last, warns Rachel Laser of Americans United for Church and State. We’re joined by Laser and two plaintiffs in a legal effort to keep the school from opening. As our guests explain, the school is part of a larger project to roll back the clock on civil rights, disability rights and labor protections. Now for the good news: tearing down the separation between church and state turns out to be ...
Mar 19, 2024•41 min
For decades we’ve been told that there is an urgent looming skills gap, and that unless our education system churns out more STEM grads, economic disaster looms. But what if it’s not true? In a provocative new book, Neil Kraus argues that this story is at the heart of what he calls the fantasy economy, a wrongheaded view of the labor market that has fueled decades of education reform. And we hear from Tim Schwab, author of an explosive new book about Bill Gates, whose deep pockets have helped to...
Feb 29, 2024•41 min
In her new book School Moms, education journalist Laura Pappano traces the rise of what she calls the “war moms,” making the case that their emergence has spurred a broad resistance movement in defense of public schools. And reluctant school mom Ashley Daly joins us from Oklahoma, where the state’s education chief has emerged as one of the nation’s leading culture warriors. The result is a feel good episode with a feel bad caveat. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast go...
Feb 15, 2024•39 min
Public schools are in the throes of multiple slow-moving crises: a teacher exodus, spiking student absenteeism and plunging literacy rates. Yet education reforms implemented as part of the Obama-era ‘theory of change’ have received little blame. Special guest Nora De La Cour, a former teacher who writes about education for Jacobin and other publications, says it’s long past time for an acknowledgment that test-centric reforms have drained the life from public schools. Such reforms have demoraliz...
Feb 01, 2024•45 min
While the media focuses obsessively on Harvard, the state universities that the majority of American students actually attend are under attack. We’re joined by faculty at three universities, all reeling from a similar combination of austerity, vocationalizing and the growing right-wing hostility to higher education. What emerges is an old story with a new twist–the latest installment in a raging battle over what college is for, who gets to decide, and who gets to attend. Our all-star cast includ...
Jan 18, 2024•44 min
The recent elections issued a stinging rebuke to conservative culture warring candidates. But the Democratic Party has been largely MIA when it comes to articulating its own vision for public education. So what should that vision look like? We invited four experts–Randi Weingarten, Jon Valant, Rick Hess and Jamaal Bowman–to lay out a path forward for Democrats. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HaveYouHeardPodcast ...
Dec 21, 2023•45 min
We've been debating how schools should educate and "Americanize" immigrant students for more than a century. In her new book, Making Americans, history teacher Jessica Lander says that schools today are far more welcoming to immigrant-origin students than in the past. But even as star educators like Jessica, Carlos Beato, who co-founded a high school for immigrant students in Maryland, and Leah Juelke, the 2017 North Dakota Teacher of the Year, show us what truly welcoming schools and teaching l...
Nov 30, 2023•37 min
Everybody loves to hate on school boards these days. But as education policy scholar Jonathan Collins reminds us, these beleaguered bodies are actually the most accessible entry points to democracy that we have. At a time when calls to make school oversight less democratic are coming from the right and education reformers, Collins makes an urgent case for using participatory local democracy to collectively solve our most pressing problems. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this p...
Nov 16, 2023•37 min
We hand the mic to the brilliant podcasters behind the Voucher Scam, a limited series exposing the big money push to bring school vouchers to Texas and beyond. Claire Campos-O’Neal and Nicole Abshire of the Mothers for Democracy Institute visit a rural community where the elected representative is no longer, well, representing. Claire and Nicole do a masterful job connecting school privatization with the rise of Christian Nationalism and the erosion of democracy. We hope you appreciate their bri...
Nov 02, 2023•43 min
Have You Heard heads to Houston, where the state now controls Texas’ largest school district. We’ll meet teachers and parents who say the takeover of the schools in this Democratic city is fundamentally about politics. And we’ll try to make sense of how the takeover fits into the efforts by Governor Greg Abbott to bring private school vouchers to the Lone Star state. Spoiler: it does.
Oct 19, 2023•39 min
The power of plutocrats to shape and limit public debate is on the increase. That’s bad for K-12 education and for democracy, argues Nora Reikosky, the winner of the 2023 Have You Heard Graduate Student Research Contest. As a young “Googler,” Nora witnessed first hand the power of corporate philanthropy and its slick sales pitch, an experience that shapes her research into what she calls “pipeline philanthropy.” The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on P...
Oct 05, 2023•36 min
Get the right credentials to get ahead in the world. For many students and their families that IS the purpose of K-12 education. Even students who don’t have their sights set on selective colleges often see learning as secondary to the work of collecting badges and tokens. How did we get here? Why do grades and test scores exert such a powerful influence over our schools? In this episode, we talk with Jack's co-author Ethan Hutt about their new book Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Ranking...
Sep 21, 2023•41 min
North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper recently declared a state of emergency for public schools in that state, warning that the GOP-controlled legislature aims to “choke the life out of public education.” Our guests, a cast of thousands, argue that the attack on public schools is part of a right-wing takeover, one that seeks to take the state back to the pre-civil rights era. But this state of emergency also represents an organizing opportunity, say public education advocates. While the word “bleak...
Aug 29, 2023•50 min
AI is about to upend teaching and learning. So tell us the techno optimists who have made essentially the same claim about every technological innovation, dating back to the film strip. Our guest, historian Larry Cuban, predicts that AI will join a long list of tech ‘silver bullets’ that have been overhyped, only to fall short of the promised utopia. Cuban argues that tech boosters are prone to such overselling because they don’t understand the nature of teaching and its reliance on human connec...
Aug 08, 2023•46 min
A wide segment of Americans now view public schools as partisan. That’s a major problem, argues historian Johann Neem, because the project of public education depends on ALL Americans seeing themselves and their interests represented there. Neem warns that the perception that schools are carrying out a political agenda is super-charging the privatization agenda and could undermine what’s left of our “common” schools entirely. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. ...
Jul 18, 2023•39 min
Decades before Moms for Liberty launched a crusade to liberate schools from “indoctrination,” the John Birch Society introduced similar rhetoric and tactics. Have You Heard is joined by historian Matthew Dallek, author of Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. The ‘Birchers,’ he argues, sought to impose their vision of morality, Christianity and patriotism on public schools. And while the group would fade into obscurity, the Birchers’ vision and tactics inform the a...
Jun 22, 2023•41 min
For decades, the idea that education is the primary driver of economic opportunity has held sway. The education myth, as our guest Jon Shelton describes it, has attained the status of common sense, captivating politicians from left to right. But the overselling of education as the fix for economic inequality has been politically disastrous, not to mention bad for schools and teachers. Shelton argues that we desperately need a new way to talk about education, one that puts schools in a larger con...
Jun 08, 2023•37 min
School privatization has been on a roll this year. But then the ‘fund students not systems’ express hit a wall in states like Kansas, Georgia and Idaho. So what happened? We talk to public education advocates in all three states and come away with some lessons in effective organizing, not to mention a much-needed dose of inspiration. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HaveYouHeardPodcast or donate on PayPal: https:/...
May 24, 2023•52 min
Jack and Jennifer sit down with Daniel Denvir, host of the Dig podcast. And ‘dig’ is an accurate description. They go deep into origins of our current education wars, how bipartisan teacher bashing laid the groundwork for today’s attacks on “woke” educators, and what the recent victory of Brandon Johnson in Chicago can tell us about the state of the education reform movement. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HaveY...
May 04, 2023•1 hr 42 min
We’re joined by four former teachers of the year who are using their ‘teacher voices’ to push back against the tidal wave of legislation limiting what kids can learn and teachers can talk about. They’re speaking truth about kids, public schools, and teachers and hoping to inspire others to do the same. Special guests: Tracey Nance, Monica Washington, Chris Dier and Jena Nelson. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Hav...
Apr 20, 2023•51 min
