Occasionally funny and periodically informative, Have You Heard features journalist Jennifer Berkshire and scholar Jack Schneider as they explore the age-old quest to finally fix the nation's public schools, one policy issue at a time.
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Despite working considerably more hours than their colleagues in other countries, teachers here say they don’t have enough time to do their jobs, leading to high rates of stress, burnout and teacher turnover. We hear from researchers and current and former teachers about the ‘time scarcity’ toll, and why any effort to ‘fix’ our schools must start by reckoning with the demands on teacher time. The…
Civic centers are all the rage on red state campuses. Designed to reclaim and “save” the humanities, reinstate ideological diversity in higher ed, and bring back the Great Books, these centers are growing rapidly, even as the old school humanities wither away. But when writer Ann Manov visited a new center at her alma mater, the University of Florida, the reality fell far short of the sales pitch.…
Waste, fraud and abuse. That’s how education policy expert Jon Valant characterizes the new federal voucher program that was tucked into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill last year. Valant walks us through the nuts and bolts of the program and explains how it undoes the federal commitment to civil rights and progressive education funding. Valant’s ultimate conclusion: Trump’s voucher program will be…
A steep decline in the birthrate means fewer students, and for a growing number of communities that means closing schools. We head to New Orleans where the ‘demographic cliff’ poses a unique problem for a market-based school system in which schools are constantly opening and closing. A recent decision by KIPP to close a school without consulting parents or students has set off an uproar and called…
Sarasota Florida was supposed to be the new capital of Magamerica. But a funny thing happened on the way to making this coastal community and its school board the epicenter of right wing activism. A whole lot of Sarasotans woke up to the reality that their schools, vulnerable students and indeed local democracy hung in the balance. Call it the backlash to the backlash or the revenge of the…
As Silicon Valley’s tentacles reach ever more deeply into the nation’s public schools, a provocative new book sounds an emphatic “stop”! We talk to Tim Scott, author of Schooling for Silicon Valley, about big tech’s dystopian vision for education, and what the sales pitch for personalized, adaptive and data-driven learning is really about. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this…
It isn’t just red states where books are being pulled from schools. In blue states, books have given way to out-of-context passages in the name of test and career prep. Add in new literacy laws that seek to tightly control how teachers teach reading and we’ve got a serious case of the blue state blues on our hands. Four current and former teachers join us to discuss what blue states keep getting…
What should kids learn about sex? Who should teach them? And if they learn too much, will they become deviants? According to Margaret Myers, the author of The Fight for Sex Ed, we’ve been fighting over these exact same questions for more than a century, obscuring the essential purpose of sex education. And Nawal Umar of the sex ed advocacy group SIECUS joins us to talk about the present day push…
Forget about ‘education freedom’ and ‘school choice.’ These conservative see the expansion of school vouchers as a government takeover of private and home schools. We head to Texas, where opposition to vouchers has emerged as a potent cause on the right, even as moderates are turned off by the GOP’s hostility to public schools. The result: an issue that could end up upending politics in the Lone…
Decades before high school students were walking out of school to protest ICE, they embraced political activism against the Vietnam War and in favor of school desegration and expanding civil rights. In a new book, scholar Aaron G. Fountain Jr. unearths the largely forgotten history of high school student activism, locating student groups, and underground newspapers, in every part of the country.…
