AI is about to upend teaching and learning. So tell us the techno optimists who have made essentially the same claim about every technological innovation, dating back to the film strip. Our guest, historian Larry Cuban, predicts that AI will join a long list of tech ‘silver bullets’ that have been overhyped, only to fall short of the promised utopia. Cuban argues that tech boosters are prone to such overselling because they don’t understand the nature of teaching and its reliance on human connection.

A wide segment of Americans now view public schools as partisan. That’s a major problem, argues historian Johann Neem, because the project of public education depends on ALL Americans seeing themselves and their interests represented there. Neem warns that the perception that schools are carrying out a political agenda is super-charging the privatization agenda and could undermine what’s left of our “common” schools entirely.

Decades before Moms for Liberty launched a crusade to liberate schools from “indoctrination,” the John Birch Society introduced similar rhetoric and tactics. Have You Heard is joined by historian Matthew Dallek, author of Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. The ‘Birchers,’ he argues, sought to impose their vision of morality, Christianity and patriotism on public schools. And while the group would fade into obscurity, the Birchers’ vision and tactics inform the activism of today’s school culture warriors.

For decades, the idea that education is the primary driver of economic opportunity has held sway. The education myth, as our guest Jon Shelton describes it, has attained the status of common sense, captivating politicians from left to right. But the overselling of education as the fix for economic inequality has been politically disastrous, not to mention bad for schools and teachers. Shelton argues that we desperately need a new way to talk about education, one that puts schools in a larger context of social democracy and economic security.

School privatization has been on a roll this year. But then the ‘fund students not systems’ express hit a wall in states like Kansas, Georgia and Idaho. So what happened? We talk to public education advocates in all three states and come away with some lessons in effective organizing, not to mention a much-needed dose of inspiration.

Jack and Jennifer sit down with Daniel Denvir, host of the Dig podcast. And ‘dig’ is an accurate description. They go deep into origins of our current education wars, how bipartisan teacher bashing laid the groundwork for today’s attacks on “woke” educators, and what the recent victory of Brandon Johnson in Chicago can tell us about the state of the education reform movement.