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 Outdated.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

An Interview with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider About ”A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” | Diane Ravitch's blog

An Interview with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider About ”A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” | Diane Ravitch's blog

An Interview with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider About ”A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door”

This interview was recorded by Town Hall in Seattle, which is a great venue for speakers but in COVID Times was recorded remotely. I interviewed them about their important new book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door.

They had some very valuable insights, and the time flew by. I hope you will take a few minutes and join us.

An Interview with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider About ”A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” | Diane Ravitch's blog

FLASH BACK: How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party | Jennifer C. Berkshire

How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party | Jennifer C. Berkshire

FLASH BACK: How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party

The Democrats and DeVos have more in common than they’d care to admit

IN A FACEBOOK POST THIS SUMMER, hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb took aim at the highest ranking Black woman in the New York legislator, Andrea Stewart-Cousins. “[H]ypocrites like Stewart-Cousins who pay fealty to powerful union thugs and bosses,” wrote Loeb, “do more damage to people of color than anyone who has ever donned a hood.” The rant, which had the exquisite misfortune of appearing just days before the actual KKK took to the streets of Charlottesville to menace nonwhite people and their allies, struck a familiar Loeb theme. In a previous post he implored his peer to take up the fight against the teachers union: “the biggest single force standing in the way of quality education and an organization that has done more to perpetuate poverty and discrimination against people of color than the KKK.”

It would be easy to dismiss all this frothing as just Loeb being Loeb. This is, after all, the same crusader for justice who once lambasted a CEO for his imperial lifestyle, not an easy charge to level from a ten-thousand-square-foot penthouse. But the NYC financier is not just any hedge fund billionaire. As the chair of the board of Success Academy, New York’s largest network of charter schools, he is a leading force within the nexus of big money and self-proclaimed school “reformers” within the Democratic party. While Loeb doesn’t limit his donations to Dems (as his profile on the married-but-looking dating site, Ashley Madison, indicated, he is not one to be tied down), he exerts the kind of outsized influence that $3.2 billion in net worth reliably commands these days.

There’s another reason why we can’t dismiss Loeb’s view that teachers unions promote income inequality and serve as a barrier to progress of any sort as just another crackpot rich-bro outburst. That’s because it’s now a key policy plank of responsible elite opinion almost everywhere. Flip back to The Economist—the bible of savvy, entrepreneurial-minded social criticism—circa 2012, and you’ll find Loeb’s screed rendered in assured magazine prose, minus the overt racist incitements. To wit: “no Wall Street financier has done as much damage to American social mobility as the teachers’ unions have.”

And where The Economist goes, influential “thought leaders” are sure to follow. So now, as America ponders the mounting economic disequilibriums that gave rise to the CONTINUE READING: How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party | Jennifer C. Berkshire

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

The Dark Secrets of the Privatization Movement: An Interview with Charles Siler | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Dark Secrets of the Privatization Movement: An Interview with Charles Siler | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Dark Secrets of the Privatization Movement: An Interview with Charles Siler

Jennifer Berkshire and I interviewed Charles Siler about his inside knowledge of the privatization movement.

Jennifer is co-author of the important new book (with Jack Schneider) called A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door.

As you will learn in the interview, Charles was brought up in a conservative environment. He studied at George Mason University in the Koch-funded economics department (you can read about it in Nancy MacLean’s excellent book Democracy in Chains, which I reviewed in The New York Review of Books). He worked for the Goldwater Institute and lobbied for ALEC and other billionaire-funded privatization groups.

At some point, he realized he was on the wrong side, promoting ideas that would do harm, not good. He wanted to do good.

He said unequivocally that the goal of the privatizers is to destroy public education. They promote charter schools and vouchers to destroy public education.

He explains that school privatization is only one part of a much broader assault on the public sector. The end game is to privatize everything: police, firefighters, roads, parks, whatever is now public, and turn it into a for-profit CONTINUE READING: The Dark Secrets of the Privatization Movement: An Interview with Charles Siler | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Bipartisan Assault on Public Schools | The New Republic

The Bipartisan Assault on Public Schools | The New Republic

The Bipartisan Assault on Public Schools

Betsy Devos was no exception in education. She pushed an agenda that Republicans and Democrats have strangely united behind for years.

Two years ago, Margaret Spellings, George W. Bush’s secretary of education, and Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s secretary of education, wrote an opinion article in The Washington Post lamenting the decline of public support for the bipartisan consensus about education policy that began under Ronald Reagan. Elected officials strongly supported a regime of testing, accountability, and school choice, they wrote, but public enthusiasm was waning due to a lack of “courage” and “political will.”

They were right. Elected officials, educators, and parents were rapidly losing faith in the bipartisan consensus. For a decade, it had failed to produce any improvement on national tests. Parents were opting their children out of the annual testing mandated by federal law; in New York, 20 percent of eligible students refused to take them. Teachers went to court to fight the test-based evaluation methods imposed by Duncan’s Race to the Top. Communities from Los Angeles to Philadelphia were complaining about the growth of charter schools, which diverted funds away from public schools. A year after Spellings and Duncan’s essay appeared, teachers across the nation, from West Virginia to California, went on strike to protest low wages, low funding, and large class sizes, issues that were ignored during the era of bipartisan consensus.

What went wrong? Why did the bipartisan consensus that Spellings and Duncan praised fall apart? In their new book, historian Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire provide a valuable guide to the history and the politics of the rise and fall of the bipartisan consensus. Theirs is indeed a cautionary tale, because they show how Republicans and Democrats joined to support failed policies whose ultimate goal was to eliminate public education and replace it with a free-market approach to schooling. Betsy DeVos was publicly reviled for her contemptuous attitudes toward public schools, but she was not an exception to the bipartisan consensus: She was its ultimate embodiment. She was the personification of the wolf at the schoolhouse door.  CONTINUE READING: The Bipartisan Assault on Public Schools | The New Republic

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

Diane Ravitch in Conversation with Jennifer Berkshire and Charles Siler - Network For Public Education

Diane Ravitch in Conversation with Jennifer Berkshire and Charles Siler - Network For Public Education

Diane Ravitch in Conversation with Jennifer Berkshire and Charles Siler

The Network for Public Education invites you to join us for a video conference with NPE President Diane Ravitch. Diane's guests will be Jennifer Berkshire and Charles Siler. Berkshire is the the co-author of the recent book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door and Siler is an anti-racist, equity, and pro-public education consultant. Join Diane, Jennifer and Charles in conversation about how public education advocates can win the messaging wars vs. those who seek to privatize public education.

Diane Ravitch in Conversation with Jennifer Berkshire and Charles Siler - Network For Public Education

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

Steve Hinnefeld Reviews “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” by Schneider and Berkshire | Diane Ravitch's blog

Steve Hinnefeld Reviews “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” by Schneider and Berkshire | Diane Ravitch's blog

Steve Hinnefeld Reviews “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” by Schneider and Berkshire

Steve Hinnefeld, an Indiana blogger, reviews Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire’s new book A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door and finds that it resonates with his own experience in Indiana.

He writes:

“A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” focuses on a fundamental debate on the nature of schools. Education, the authors argue, is best treated as a public good that belongs to everyone.

“Like clean air, a well-educated populace is something with wide-reaching benefits,” Berkshire and Schneider write. “That’s why we treat public education more like a park than a country club. We tax ourselves to pay for it, and we open it to everyone.”

The alternative: education as a private good that benefits and belongs to those who consume it. In that increasingly influential view, families should choose schools – or other education products and services — the same way they CONTINUE READING: Steve Hinnefeld Reviews “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” by Schneider and Berkshire | Diane Ravitch's blog

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