Can We Salvage Public Education?

Beth and Andrew speak with educator, political scientist, and author, Rick Hess, who shares his views on whether we can reform our country’s failing K-12 education system.

We discuss the appalling results of our public schools in teaching kids reading, math, history and civics, and how they have declined even more since the covid pandemic. Hess talks about how progressive ideology has taken over the education establishment including graduate schools of education and shares his opinions on what we can do to potentially reform the education system and why he is newly optimistic given the rise of the parent’s movement in the post-covid years as a force for change.

Frederick M. Hess is a senior fellow and the director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on K–12 and higher education issues. The author of Education Week’s popular blog “Rick Hess Straight Up,” Dr. Hess is also an executive editor of Education Next and a senior contributor to Forbes. He is the founder and chairman of AEI’s Conservative Education Reform Network.

Dr. Hess started his career as a high school social studies teacher and has since taught at colleges including Rice, Harvard, Georgetown, and the University of Virginia. His books include "Spinning Wheels,” “Letters to a Young Education Reformer," "Cage-Busting Leadership," “A Search for Common Ground,” and “The Great School Rethink.”