About Us
Jennifer Berkshire
Jennifer Berkshire grew up in the Midwest, and while she has long since been transplanted to the East Coast, she will forever be a Heartlander at heart. She discovered her love for storytelling while covering a series of bitter labor battles in her native Illinois in the early 1990s. Grad school couldn’t compare, and so she forsook academic life for one of an itinerant interviewer. Her interest in—some would say ‘obsession’ with—public education began in 2006 when she took a job editing the statewide newspaper for AFT Massachusetts. She would go on to start an irreverent blog called EduShyster, chronicling the excesses of the education reform movement.
Jennifer writes about the intersection of education and politics for the Nation, the New Republic, the Baffler, the New York Times, and other publications. She is the author of three books: More Worlds to Negotiate: John Dunlop and the Art of Problem Solving; A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School (with Jack), and The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual (also with Jack). She teaches in the Boston College Prison Education Program. A licensed public school teacher, Jennifer lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Follow her on Twitter.
Jack Schneider
Jack Schneider is a scholar, teacher, writer, and activist. In his day job, he is the Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he leads the Beyond Test Scores Project. His academic research broadly examines how educators, policymakers, and the public develop particular views about what is true, what is effective, and what is important in education, and he is particularly interested in how those views can diverge from ground-level reality inside schools and communities. Much of his work, for instance, looks at how student learning and school quality are quantified, and details the intended and unintended consequences of such efforts.
Jack also writes frequently for the public in outlets like the New York Times, the Nation, and the Atlantic, often making the case that educational reform is more complex than many of its champions would have us imagine. In his work with Jennifer—on the podcast and on the page—he has established a reputation as a defender of public education's core principles, even as he has been an outspoken critic of racial and economic injustice. As a result, he tends to be unpopular with those who blame schools for inequality, and he is generally loathed by free market zealots. Follow Jack on Twitter.