Have You Heard

Updated: 29 May 2025 • 199 episodes
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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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Legal scholar Derek Black is a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s anti-DEI crusade, arguing that the effort to impose what he calls ‘loyalty oaths’ on schools is blatantly unconstitutional. Black argues that the attacks on public education are at the center of a larger project aimed at undermining the two centr

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We’re headed to California, where high school students will soon be required to complete an ethnic studies course in order to graduate. The policy has set off the predictable culture war response, with critics charging that ethnic studies is indoctrination, activism, DEI, CRT, etc. But lost in the fog of backlash are t

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The vision of the future on offer from Donald Trump looks a lot like the past, when men were men, women stayed home, and just about everyone was less educated. To get a glimpse of what that future might look like we head to Indiana, one of the great ‘human capital anti-success stories of the 21st century,’ according to

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The best schools in the country may be run by - wait for it - the Defense Department. But as education researcher Kenneth Wong tells us, the schools’ success is a fairly recent development, reflecting a years-long overhaul centered on improving teaching and learning. Alas, the ‘what works’ era that would have once sent

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We’re headed to Vermont where public schools are confronting a ‘perfect storm’ of challenges. Costs are rising in this largely rural state even as the student population is declining, fueling a taxpayer revolt. Meanwhile, thanks to a recent SCOTUS ruling, a tradition of funding private schools with public funds means t

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Like just about everyone these days, our own Jack Schneider is troubled–make that frightened–by our political landscape. But however deep our divides may be, there’s one issue that can, if not bring us together, allow for at least a conversation. The dismantling of the public education system would be so obviously bad

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