Have You Heard

For decades the Republican mantra on public schools has been to make them ‘business like,’ driven by the belief that strong schools = a strong economy. No more. Today’s top priorities for the GOP are moving students into private religious schools and home schools, and infusing religion into public schools. How did such

Donald Trump’s return to office is likely to have profound implications for the nation’s public schools. In this episode we start to grapple with five major policy areas that are likely to be impacted: immigration, school choice, teacher unions, student civil rights and religion. With the aid of experts Sophia Rodrigue

Schools are in for more chaos and conflict, whatever specific policies are enacted by a second Trump Administration. We talk to two scholars about just how much the politics of disruption are costing, in terms of the material costs to school district budgets and the erosion of community trust. The research of Rachel Wh

Massachusetts voters will soon weigh in on whether to abandon the state’s de facto high school exit exam. That prospect has pitted elected officials and business leaders against teachers and their union, as well as a majority of voters, who’ve grown weary of schools’ focus on standardized testing. But the contentious d

As long as we’ve had public schools, we’ve had ‘edu-grifters,’ slick salesmen armed with promises to provide education on the cheap. In this episode, we meet one of the OG edu-grifters, one Joseph Lancaster, who arrived on these shores in the 1820’s with an irresistible sales pitch: schools that were basically free bec

We head to Fort Collins, CO where a plan to shutter multiple schools and “rightsize” the school district ran into a wall of community opposition. A feel-good tale for our feel-bad times, Fort Collins’ example signals, not just resistance to school closures, but to the larger vision of school choice and competition that