Many school districts are beginning to see pandemic learning losses greater than they imagined. It’s time to figure out what to next, says Harvard Professor Tom Kane, an economist studying catch-up efforts. He wants districts to be empowered to make the best decision going forward. In his latest research, he’s helping districts determine how to plan for these losses and shares what interventions might provide the most bang for the buck. In this episode, Kane shares troubling information about ho...
Apr 20, 2022•19 min•Season 1Ep. 404
Stewart Kwoh believes education is the best tool to fight back against ongoing anti-Asian American violence and damaging stereotypes. As co-executive director of the Asian American Education Project, Kwoh has been dedicated to developing curriculums and trainings for educators. Despite many of the lesson plans and tools being available for free, Kwoh admits it has taken time for education to embrace this rich history. In this episode, he shares the importance of learning about Asian American his...
Apr 13, 2022•22 min•Season 1Ep. 403
Harvard Professor Sarah Dryden-Peterson knows that we can do a lot better for the nearly 30 million refugees in the world. As an expert on refugee education, she says education needs to create better supports for displaced children whose education is disrupted, dominated by exclusion and uncertainty about the future. In her latest research, she shares how governments and international agencies have been hindered in this work and how refugee teachers and students are leading the way to better edu...
Apr 06, 2022•27 min•Season 1Ep. 402
A silver lining of the pandemic, says Harvard Professor Fernando Reimers, was the push for education to innovate. Through the pandemic, Reimers set out to study how education systems around the world sought out innovations, even in places that had few resources. While it was reassuring how many education systems worldwide tried to make changes, Reimers discusses how he saw a dip in that creative ingenuity over time during the pandemic and why. In this episode, he also shares the unique ways that...
Mar 30, 2022•30 min•Season 1Ep. 401
Juliana Urtubey, the 2021 National Teacher of the Year recipient, knows firsthand the importance of valuing all parts of a student’s identity. As a first generation, bilingual immigrant, Urtubey brings all parts of herself into the classroom. Today, as a special education teacher working at the Kermit R. Booker, Sr. Innovative Elementary School in Las Vegas, she leans into her diverse classroom and community, fully celebrating it. In this episode, she shares experiences and ideas for embracing s...
Mar 23, 2022•24 min•Season 1Ep. 400
Harvard Professor Dick Light has visited 260 college campuses talking to administrators, faculty, and students to figure out what sets a great university apart from an okay one. It turns out there are simple and affordable steps higher education administrators can do to make impactful changes on their campuses. Light has long studied the work of higher education and has plenty of stories to share about what happens when a university gets it right versus what happens when it goes wrong. In this E...
Mar 16, 2022•30 min•Season 1Ep. 399
Since the start of the pandemic, education has grappled with a looming threat of teacher shortages and a mass exodus of teachers. Elizabeth Steiner, a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, has released two studies in the past year exploring job-related stress among teachers and recently school leaders. She says the changing modes of instruction, changing guidance on quarantining, mask and vaccine debates, and what's happening at home affects educators. They are one of the most stressed and ...
Mar 09, 2022•16 min•Season 1Ep. 398
For the past decade, college enrollments have steadily been on the decline. The pandemic appears to have accelerated such drops with reports of more than a million fewer students attending college today. Chris Gabrieli, the chairman of the Board of the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, agrees that this decline is a crisis with the potential to affect many different parts of society beyond just a person's future. He talks about how higher education is moving much too slowly to abate t...
Mar 02, 2022•22 min•Season 1Ep. 397
When Gloria Ladson-Billings set out in the 1990s to adapt critical race theory from law to education, she couldn’t have predicted that it would become the focus of heated school debates today. In recent years, the scrutiny of critical race theory – a theory she pioneered to help explain racial inequities in education – has become heavily-politicized in school communities and by legislators. She says it has been grossly misunderstood and used as a lump term about many things that are not actually...
Feb 23, 2022•24 min•Season 1Ep. 396
Before the pandemic hit, Harvard Professor Stephanie Jones and Lecturer Emily Hanno were already tracking young children's development as part of the Early Learning Study at Harvard. As the pandemic began unfolding, they started to see shifts among the thousands of families and children participating in the study. Families reported a rise in temper tantrums, anxiety, and a poor ability to manage emotions, especially among the young elementary-aged children participating in remote learning. These...
Feb 16, 2022•21 min•Season 1Ep. 395
Many parents want to raise kind and compassionate children, but in today's world it can be difficult to figure out how. Traci Baxley, an associate professor at Florida Atlantic University, is a mother of five children and believes parenting can be a form of activism. She is the author of "Social Justice Parenting: How to Raise Compassionate, Anti-Racist, Justice-Minded Kids in an Unjust World." In this episode of the EdCast, she shares ideas for how to create an environment where kids can see th...
Dec 15, 2021•20 min•Season 1Ep. 394
What is driving an increase in college completion rates? It's not student characteristics or higher student enrollments, says Jeff Denning, an associate professor at Brigham Young University. Denning, an economist noticed the increasing trend started in the 1990s, and upon looking deeper discovered grade inflation is driving numbers up. In this episode, Denning explains this change and what it might mean for higher education.
Dec 08, 2021•10 min•Season 1Ep. 393
COVID has challenged many education systems worldwide. This is especially true for developing countries that faced significant learning issues prior to COVID. How far did COVID set these education systems back? How can countries like Brazil move forward? Claudia Costin, the founder and director of the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Education Policies at Getulio Vargas Foundation in Brazil, discusses how COVID has impacted education in Brazil and offers a path forward.
Dec 01, 2021•20 min•Season 1Ep. 392
Math class doesn't seem the likely place to practice gratitude, but Michael Fauteux discovered that it had the power to change it. While teaching a 9th grade math class, Fauteux begin implementing moments of gratitude and soon started to see impacts on student learning. Through Fauteux's non-profit GiveThx that uses digital thank you notes and research based lessons to nurture mental health and improve academic success, he's sharing the practice in classrooms around the country. Since its launch...
Nov 24, 2021•21 min•Season 1Ep. 391
Christopher Emdin wants schools to embraces a whole student's identity. For far too long, public education has been stuck where it was not designed for all students, especially students of color, he says. Emdin, an associate professor at Teachers College, has long focused on issues of race, class, and diversity in education. Now, he's proposing a new educational model to help teachers and students celebrate ratchet identity in the classroom. He reimagines schools where educators use authenticity...
Nov 17, 2021•27 min•Season 1Ep. 390
What are children learning about climate change in American schools? That question set award winning journalist Katie Worth to uncover how climate change education is being taught. As part of her research, she visited several states, talked to teachers, scoured text books, and spoke to students and their families. It turns out climate change education is just as contentious in the classroom as it is in politics. In this episode, she shares points of friction happening between teachers within the...
Nov 10, 2021•23 min•Season 1Ep. 389
Mistakes are supposed to be part of learning. However, Maleka Donaldson knows how we convey mistakes and respond to them as educators can significantly impact a child's learning experience. Donaldson is an assistant professor at Smith College where she studies teacher-student interactions and responding to mistakes in early learning. In her book, "From Oops to Aha: Portraits of Learning from Mistakes in Kindergarten," she examines instruction in the classrooms of four public school kindergarten ...
Nov 03, 2021•27 min•Season 1Ep. 388
Higher education needs major change and reinvention to provide more opportunity and social mobility for everyone. This is what Paul LeBlanc hopes to see in the future. As the president of Southern New Hampshire University for 18 years, LeBlanc has led tremendous change including becoming the largest nonprofit provider of online higher education and to offer a full competency-based degree program. In this episode of the EdCast, LeBlanc shares insight into why and how the institution made these gr...
Oct 27, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 387
The school nurse's job encompasses much more than you'd think. Even before COVID, the school nurse was the "health hub" of the school. Yet 25.2% of schools don't even have a nurse. Linda Mendonca, the president of the National Association of School Nurses, discusses the need for school nurses and how they are doing much more than most of us realize. She offers guidance for the school community, especially administrators, on how to make sure your school nurse is a part of important conversations....
Oct 20, 2021•14 min•Season 1Ep. 386
It's a contentious time to be a school board member in America. Michael Casserly, a strategic adviser for the Council of the Great City Schools, reflects on the current state of school board meetings happening around the country. He also provides insight regarding the purpose of school boards, what a board needs to do to function well, and how to manage controversy.
Oct 13, 2021•22 min•Season 1Ep. 385
There's a lot of conversation in education about how to use this summer to make up for lost academic time in COVID. But depending on the student and the situation -- summer school may or may not be the right solution. Catherine Augustine, a senior policy researcher at RAND Corporation, has spent many years examining what makes summer school effective. She advises that while summer school isn't magic, it can also be beneficial for some children. Additionally, she breaks down some of the differenc...
Apr 21, 2021•18 min•Season 1Ep. 384
Jessica Lahey wondered how to keep kids from developing addictions to drugs and alcohol. She thought about it in her job as an educator at an inpatient drug and alcohol rehab for adolescents. She also pondered this as a parent and an alcoholic. Lahey knows that preventing substance abuse isn't cut and dry. In her new book, The Addiction Inoculation, she explores substance abuse risks and what parents need to know to keep their children safe.
Apr 14, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 383
DC Public School Chancellor Lewis Ferebee was making strides on student academic gains, growing enrollments and creating the positive environment that he wanted for the nearly 50,000 students in the district. Then COVID happened. Like many education leaders, he faced unprecedented challenges to deliver distance learning, properly ventilate school buildings, extend supports and reopen schools. Ferebee shares what it has been like to lead the district though this time and some of the unique steps ...
Apr 07, 2021•20 min•Season 1Ep. 382
The pandemic has exposed gender inequities that don't often get talked about in education. It doesn't matter whether women work in early childhood, or higher education, or somewhere in between, these inequities play out similarly across the field. Jennie Weiner, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut, studies how to make education -- especially leadership -- more inclusive and equitable. While education has long been a "highly feminized profession," Weiner explains the unique wa...
Mar 31, 2021•25 min•Season 1Ep. 381
How has the end of adolescence changed or has it at all? Harvard Professor Nancy Hill and Lecturer Alexis Redding set out to better understand changes in adolescent development across generations. When they discovered an untapped archive from the 1970s, they expected to uncover huge changes, especially considering how the world shifted in the past 50 years. Instead they found common ties among the generations. They share how these generational similarities offer insight into how we can better su...
Mar 24, 2021•26 min•Season 1Ep. 380
Systemic racism has deeply permeated all aspects of our schools to the point it's gone viral. Racist curriculum and racist acts of teachers have trended on social media, even though it's long been a problem in schools. Bree Picower, an associate professor at Montclair State University, says it's more than 'just a few bad teachers' and really a complex problem that needs to be managed on multiple levels from teacher education programs to the classroom. She's a teacher educator who has studied how...
Mar 17, 2021•21 min•Season 1Ep. 379
President Biden's recent insistence that standardized testing should happen this year has been met with reluctance in many states. Harvard Professor Andrew Ho explains the importance of moving forward with standardized testing and what it can tell us about the impact of COVID on students. Ho is a psychometrician who studies educational assessments. He explains why we must consider this more an "educational census" rather than an "assessment" and how to achieve that. He also discusses how much we...
Mar 10, 2021•19 min•Season 1Ep. 378
Think that propaganda is an outdated thing of the past? Well, think again. Propaganda is everywhere -- in the news, entertainment, politics, education, social media and more. Renee Hobbs, a media literacy expert, says it's vital that adults and children better understand how to identify and analyze propaganda. Hobbs, the director of URI's Media Education Lab, and the author of "Mind Over Media," is leading the way in what propaganda education looks like in our classrooms. She shares the history ...
Mar 03, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 377
Developmental Psychologist Susan Engel discusses the importance of nurturing young children's ideas, and why we need to pay closer attention to what they think. Engel, a senior lecturer in psychology at Williams College, has long explored children's curiosity and how they learn to pursue ideas. From a young age, children's obsessions with dinosaurs or puddles or even topics like death are opportunities as educators and parents to nurture their ideas and interests. Engel shares ways for educators...
Feb 24, 2021•27 min•Season 1Ep. 376
What will the future of college be like post-COVID? If one thing is sure, COVID has already significantly altered college admissions. Princeton Review Editor-in-Chief Robert Franek breaks down some of the changes in college admissions like the test optional movement and whether to take the SATs. Franek also addresses how college application rates seem to be trending upward and whether high school juniors and seniors should consider deferring or attending the next few years of college....
Feb 17, 2021•21 min•Season 1Ep. 375
