The K-12 Culture Wars – Have You Heard

The K-12 Culture Wars – Have You Heard

The K-12 Culture Wars

The public school culture wars are raging more intensely than at any time since the Reagan era. Fueled by intense political polarization and the continued fallout from pandemic school closures, the culture wars now threaten public education. Special guests: New Hampshire teacher Misty Crompton, Iowa teacher Nick Covington, Missouri teacher Jessica Piper and New York City teacher Selena Carrión.

Episode transcript is here. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon or donate on PayPal.

Have You Heard · #113 The K-12 Culture Wars

The K-12 Culture Wars – Have You Heard

Inefficient, Ineffective, and Absolutely Necessary: The Case for Elected School Boards – Have You Heard

Inefficient, Ineffective, and Absolutely Necessary: The Case for Elected School Boards – Have You Heard

Inefficient, Ineffective, and Absolutely Necessary: The Case for Elected School Boards

Inefficient. Ineffective. Outdated. Outmoded. Unrepresentative. Sure, local school boards are deserving of all of these criticisms (and more), but they are also seedbeds of local democracy at a time when democracy is under attack. Special guests: school board member and scholar Rachel White, and school committee member Roberto Jiménez Rivera.

Episode transcript is here. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon or donate on PayPal.

Have You Heard · #112 Inefficient, Ineffective, and Absolutely Necessary: The Case for Elected School Boards

Inefficient, Ineffective, and Absolutely Necessary: The Case for Elected School Boards – Have You Heard

New Hampshire: The Libertarian Attack on Government | Diane Ravitch's blog

New Hampshire: The Libertarian Attack on Government | Diane Ravitch's blog

New Hampshire: The Libertarian Attack on Government

Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider explore what happens when a state government is taken over by a combination of libertarians, who want to diminish government and taxes, and Republicans, who have spent decades attacking government as “the enemy.” It turns out they are indistinguishable. .

This is a don’t-miss edition of their reader-supported “Have You Heard” podcast (with transcript available).

Among the services cut were garbage collection and animal control. So people in the state are getting used to seeing bears ransacking their garbage.

The situation is growing dire for the state’s public schools. The libertarians want to eliminate public education. They want to replace it with charter schools, vouchers, home schooling, and pretty much anything that a parent wants to do.

Under the leadership of Governor Chris Sununu and CONTINUE READING: New Hampshire: The Libertarian Attack on Government | Diane Ravitch's blog

State of Siege: What the Free State Project Means for New Hampshire’s Public Schools – Have You Heard

State of Siege: What the Free State Project Means for New Hampshire’s Public Schools – Have You Heard

State of Siege: What the Free State Project Means for New Hampshire’s Public Schools

Two decades ago, the Free State Project announced an audacious plan to make New Hampshire a utopia for libertarians. Now one of their central goals – privatizing education – appears within reach. Have You Heard heads to the Granite State to explore New Hampshire’s shifting political terrain and why what began as a fringe political movement is no laughing matter. Guests: Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, author, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear. 

Episode transcript is here. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon or donate on PayPal.

Have You Heard · #111 State of Siege: What the Free State Project Means for New Hampshire’s Public Schools

State of Siege: What the Free State Project Means for New Hampshire’s Public Schools – Have You Heard

Failure to Disrupt. Again – Have You Heard

Failure to Disrupt. Again – Have You Heard

Failure to Disrupt. Again

The pandemic gave the education technology industry the opportunity to FINALLY deliver on the bold promises it has been making for decades. What happened instead was just another failure to disrupt, says MIT’s Justin Reich. Transcript is here. And a description of the Imagining September project with links to participate is here.

Have You Heard 

Failure to Disrupt. Again – Have You Heard

What They’ve Lost – Have You Heard

What They’ve Lost – Have You Heard

What They’ve Lost

Students from Boston tell Have You Heard what they’ve lost during this year of pandemic learning. Spoiler: what you’ll hear bears little resemblance to the discussion of “learning loss” that’s atop the agenda of policy makers right now. Special guest Boston teacher Neema Avashia helps us make sense of the gap between how students are feeling and how adults with power are talking. Episode transcript is here.

The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon or donate on PayPal.

Have You Heard · #109 What They’ve Lost

What They’ve Lost – Have You Heard

Kids as Customers – Have You Heard

Kids as Customers – Have You Heard

Kids as Customers

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is creating a network of tuition-free Montessori-inspired preschools for low-income students. But his vision of schools that nurture the autonomy and creativity of kids is on a collision course with the Amazon workplaces Bezos has engineered for adults. Special guest: Mira Debs, author of Diverse Families, Desirable Schools: Public Montessori in the Era of School Choice. Transcript available here.

Note: Have You Heard listeners can get 20% of Mira’s book if they eschew Amazon and order direct through Harvard Education Press. Just enter the code DFDS21. 

And if you’re a fan of Have You Heard, consider supporting us on Patreon. Right now, if you subscribe at the $10/month rate, we’ll send you an autographed copy of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door.

Have You Heard · #108 Kids as Customers

Kids as Customers – Have You Heard

Learning to Earn – Have You Heard

Learning to Earn – Have You Heard

Learning to Earn

The idea that more education is the way to help workers get ahead is a cherished American principle. In fact, this “human capital” view of education dates all the way back to another period of roaring inequality in the US: the Gilded Age. In episode #107, historian Cristina Groeger joins us to discuss the origins of the “education fix,” and why the idea of educating our way out of inequality has always been doomed to fail.

Episode transcript is here. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon or donate on PayPal.

Have You Heard · #107 Learning to Earn

Learning to Earn – Have You Heard

School Ratings, Rankings and Wrongdoing – Have You Heard

School Ratings, Rankings and Wrongdoing – Have You Heard

School Ratings, Rankings and Wrongdoing

School ranking season is on us once again, which means that Have You Heard co-host Jack Schneider is in a lather. Episode #106 is devoted to demystifying the “brutal pessimism” of school rankings and ratings, from higher education to K-12. And who better to join us than Akil Bello, Senior Director of Advocacy and Advancement at FairTest?

Complete transcript of the episode is here. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon or donate on PayPal.

Have You Heard · #106 School Rankings, Ratings, and Wrongdoing

School Ratings, Rankings and Wrongdoing – Have You Heard

Reopening a Can of Worms – Have You Heard

Reopening a Can of Worms – Have You Heard

Reopening a Can of Worms

Have You Heard wades into the pitched debate about reopening schools. We hear from an epidemiologist, then tour the land to talk to parents and teachers who are trying to navigate an impossibly complex situation.

Have You Heard · #105 Reopening a Can of Worms

The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon or donate on PayPal. And Jennifer and Jack’s book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, is out and available wherever you buy books!

Reopening a Can of Worms – Have You Heard

John Thompson Reviews “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door”: A Frightening Future Ahead | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Thompson Reviews “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door”: A Frightening Future Ahead | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Thompson Reviews “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door”: A Frightening Future Ahead

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reviews historian Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire’s A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door. Schneider and Berkshire have collaborated on podcasts called “Have You Heard.”

Thompson writes:

The first 2/3rds of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, is an excellent history of attacks on public education. It taught me a lot; the first lesson I learned is that I was too stuck in the 2010s and was wrong to accept the common view of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos as a “joke” and a “political naif.” The last 1/3^rd left me breathless as Schneider’s and Berkshire’s warnings sunk in.

A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door starts with an acknowledgement that DeVos isn’t the architect of the emerging school privatization tactics. That “radical agenda” has been decades in the making. But she represents a new assault on public education values. As Schneider and Berkshire note, accountability-driven, charter-driven, corporate reform were bad enough but they wanted to transform, not destroy public education. They wanted “some form” of public schools. DeVos’ CONTINUE READING: John Thompson Reviews “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door”: A Frightening Future Ahead | Diane Ravitch's blog

A New Secretary for the Department of Education – Have You Heard

A New Secretary for the Department of Education – Have You Heard

A New Secretary for the Department of Education

What does the selection of Miguel Cardona for Secretary of Education portend for K-12 education? Kevin Welner, head of the National Education Policy Center, joins Jack and Jennifer to discuss how Cardona is likely to differ from Betsy DeVos – and Arne Duncan.

Complete transcript of the episode is here. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon or donate on PayPal.

Jennifer and Jack’s book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, is out and available wherever you buy books!

Have You Heard · #104 A New Secretary for the Department of Education

Jennifer and Jack’s book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, is out and available wherever you buy books!

Reaganland: Public Education and America’s Right Turn – Have You Heard

Reaganland: Public Education and America’s Right Turn – Have You Heard

Reaganland: Public Education and America’s Right Turn

In the latest episode of Have You Heard, we talk to Rick Perlstein, author of the monumental new history Reaganland, about America’s ‘right turn’ against public education. As Perlstein recounts, public schools were at the very center of the culture wars of the 1970’s. From parents in the northeast revolting against court-ordered busing to the textbook wars of Kanawha County, West Virginia that culminated in the bombing of the school board offices, 1970’s America was a site of simmering resentment, which was then weaponized by a rising generation of new right activists.

Complete transcript of the episode is here. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon or donate on PayPal.

Jennifer and Jack’s book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, is out and available wherever you buy books!

Have You Heard · #103 Reaganland: Public Education and America’s Right Turn

Reaganland: Public Education and America’s Right Turn – Have You Heard

We Are All Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf | Teacher in a strange land

We Are All Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf | Teacher in a strange land

We Are All Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf

I just finished reading A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School, by Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider. Berkshire and Schneider are co-hosts of the podcast Have You Heard, which is the best $2 I spend every month—and, as journalist and historian, both bring interesting perspectives to the ongoing discourse about what used to be called, without a trace of irony or bitterness, education reform.

It’s not a long book—217 pages plus another 40 pages of notes and references—and it’s eminently readable. It would be an excellent choice for anyone who cares about public education—parents and grandparents, policy-makers, teachers and school leaders—to use as concise handbook explaining what the hell happened to public schools over the last couple of decades. There’s a bit of history, a good look at failed-over-time policies, and a clear analysis of the intersecting factors that got us to this point.

Who wants to see public education die, and why? Berkshire and Schneider tell you, but like all interesting and disturbing stories, you have to trace backward first, to the origins and mission of public schooling and the conflicting values America assigned to education, as a start-up nation. This sounds tedious, but it’s not. In short, succinct chapters, the authors spend the first quarter of the book laying the groundwork for the rapid changes—the dismantling of a once-noble idea—we’ve seen in the 21st century.

Ernest Boyer once said that public school is a stage upon which Americans play out CONTINUE READING: We Are All Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf | Teacher in a strange land

Big Education Ape: 100th Episode: A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door – Have You Heard - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2020/10/100th-episode-wolf-at-schoolhouse-door.html