Will Bunch joins us to talk about his impossibly timely new book: After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It. Discussed in this episode: how college almost became a public good (and could again); how the right fanned the flames of culture war to push higher education privatization; and why we should be so concerned that the GOP is now using the same playbook to target K-12. Also, is Biden’s student debt relief plan a blip or does it mark a move away from the vision of education as human capital development?

Have You Heard heads to New Orleans, home to the first all-charter-school system in the country. In a provocative new book, Tulane University political scientist Celeste Lay argues that New Orleans’ charter school experiment has undermined democracy, disenfranchising the very parents it was meant to empower. With school privatization on the march across the country, Lay’s account offers an urgent and timely warning.

The movement of students and parents to end harsh discipline and dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools made major gains. Then came the pandemic. Now, with calls for returning police to schools and “hardening” them in response to shooting threats, the movement’s success may be in jeopardy. Special guests: Mark Warren, author of Willful Defiance, and Jonathan Stith, the national director of the Alliance for Educational Justice.

Long before Moms for Liberty or Parents Defending Education, conservative mothers in the 1950's led a crusade to free the schools from communism. These activists waged fierce battles to resist the red menace, which they saw everywhere, including in the emerging field of mental health and in "progressive education"--any effort made to influence the way that children thought. Special guest: Michelle Nickerson, authors of Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right.

The attachment of rural communities to their local schools is intense. But that commitment may be fraying in a time of culture war, education populism and teacher shortages. Have You Heard visits western Kansas where rural school advocates are passionate about their local schools even as they fear for their future. Special guests: Matthew Clay, Krysten Clay, Stephanie Wick and Scott Gregory.

Jack and Jennifer are joined by sociologist Beth Popp Berman, author of the new book Thinking Like an Economist. Berman chronicles how economists and their style of reasoning (think ‘competition,’ ‘choice’ and efficiency’) took over one domain after another beginning in the 1960’s, constraining Democrats’ policy visions in the process.