Have You Heard Podcast
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.
Latest episodes
Have You Heard heads to West Virginia, where public schools face a precarious future. As the stateâs voucher program expands, the small schools that are the lifeblood of many rural communities are increasingly on the chopping block. We talk to West Virginians across the state about some of the challenges facing public schools, and why a political backlash to the GOPâs complete control of the state may be brewing.
Traditional student discipline is broken. Thatâs the premise of an exciting experiment in student-run restorative justice taking place at Attleboro High School in southeastern Massachusetts. Students whoâve committed minor disciplinary infractions can now go before a jury of their literal peers in an effort to repair the harm theyâve done. Far from letting offenders off easy, Youth Court holds students accountable in a way that detention or in-school suspension doesnât.
In this special episode weâre showcasing a brand new education podcast: Budget Committee! School finance is complicated, but it doesnât have to be that way. In their new show, school finance whisperers Derek Gottlieb and David Backer dig into the data, demystifying the jargon and the lingo to help listeners not just understand the numbers but push for change. Weâre big fans and we think you will be too.
Despite working considerably more hours than their colleagues in other countries, teachers here say they donât 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 âtime scarcityâ toll, and why any effort to âfixâ our schools must start by reckoning with the demands on teacher time.
Civic centers are all the rage on red state campuses. Designed to reclaim and âsaveâ 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. Thatâs how education policy expert Jon Valant characterizes the new federal voucher program that was tucked into Trumpâs 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. Valantâs ultimate conclusion: Trumpâs voucher program will be the greatest source of waste, fraud, and abuse that we have seen in our lifetimes in K-12 education.
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 âdemographic cliffâ 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 new attention to the democracy deficit in New Orleansâ all-charter-school model.
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 normies, the resistance is alive and well in southwest Florida.
As Silicon Valleyâs tentacles reach ever more deeply into the nationâs public schools, a provocative new book sounds an emphatic âstopâ! We talk to Tim Scott, author of Schooling for Silicon Valley, about big techâs dystopian vision for education, and what the sales pitch for personalized, adaptive and data-driven learning is really about.
It isnât 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 weâve 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 wrong about public education. Special guests: John Downes-Angus, Annie Abrams, Nora De La Cour and Jeff Austin.
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, weâve 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 to mandate the teaching of the so-called success sequence in schools.
Forget about âeducation freedomâ and âschool choice.â 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 GOPâs hostility to public schools. The result: an issue that could end up upending politics in the Lone Star State.